I smiled at the name Winslow, scrawled in fancy letters on an old trunk. I'd written that myself, back in the 1970s, when I thought that the suitcase was cool. I wanted to claim it to store my stuff. But I knew it was stuffed to the gills with musty documents given to mom when her parents [Gladys Gose Pearce and J Kenneth Pearce] passed away. However, I never looked at the papers inside it," writes Laurie Winslow Sargent in a blog post titled, Adventures in the Attic.

It was only last year when Sargent scooped out the heap of correspondence—postmarked between the 1920s and 1930s from India—that she realised it was the discovery of a lifetime.