Woman’s Letter Delivered to Family After 83 Years

— -- When Ann MacMichael’s brother called her up a few days ago, she could hardly believe what he had to tell her.

“He just said, you know, ‘You won’t believe what I just got.’ He said, ‘I just got a letter that was written by Aunt Miriam,’” MacMichael of Skowhegan, Maine, told ABC News in a Wednesday interview.

What was so unbelievable was that Aunt Miriam -- Miriam McMichael Robinson – had died in 1996, and her letter had been mailed 83 years ago, in 1931.

250 WWII Letters Found in Hatbox Returned to Soldier's Family

Woman Receives WWII Era Letter From Father She Never Met

Soldier's WW II Letters to Wife Find Son 69 Years Later

The yellowed envelope bears a 2-cent stamp, and was postmarked from Houlton, Maine. Written in flowing longhand, it was addressed to Mrs. J.E. McMichael – McMichael’s mother, Dollena McMichael -- in Pittsfield, Maine.

Dollena McMichael has also died.

“We were really, obviously flabbergasted by it so I’ve spent the last two or three days backtracking around, trying to figure out where it came from,” MacMichael said. “I went to the Pittsfield, Maine, post office and they said they just got it in the incoming mail with no explanation, no – no nothing.”

MacMichael gave credit to the people at the Pittsfield post office for tracking her family down. She and her brother hadn’t lived in Pittsfield for about 40 years, she said, but the workers asked around and encountered someone who remembered that the family had moved to Skowhegan.

The letter was sent to the Skowhegan post office, and the postmaster asked her brother if he recognized the name on the letter.

“And my brother said ‘Yes, it’s addressed to my grandmother,’” MacMichael said.

Workers at the post offices in Houlton and Pittsfield believe the letter may have been stuck to equipment all these years, MacMichael said.

MacMichael told ABC News that her aunt’s correspondence was sent to catch her mother up on all that had been going on in her life.

In the letter, her aunt described her teaching job and her Boston-area job search. She also invited her mother to come and visit and see where she’d been living for a year, and also talked about her younger twin brothers, to whom she was very close. One of those brothers was MacMichael’s father.

In her letter, her aunt also mentioned a boyfriend.

“None of us know who it was -- it wasn’t my uncle,” MacMichael said. “It must have been before she met my uncle.

“Her son doesn’t know who it was either,” she added. “She mentioned this boyfriend that she had heard from [him] and she said she liked him a lot and he had asked her to a dance.”

MacMichael laughed as she described another part of the letter in which her aunt, who played the piano, talked about a visiting professor from New York who was preparing a women’s chorus for a big music festival.

She wrote that she watched the professor’s interaction with the women of the chorus. MacMichael shared the text of the letter with ABC News, and in it, her aunt described the professor as “an erratic old thing.”

“He is the strangest thing,” Miriam McMichael wrote to her mother. “He would say, for instance, ‘For God’s sake, you stupid fools, can’t you even read the notes.’ Etc [sic]. I wouldn’t have played for $100 and taken those insulting remarks all evening. But those 75 women or more sat and took it, sang their heads off, and bowed down and worshipped. Why are some people so foolish?”

Reading that portion of her aunt’s letter “was the funniest part of all,” Ann MacMichael said.

MacMichael considered it ironic that, at the start of the letter, her aunt apologized to her mother for not having written earlier.

“We’ve laughed about it for several days now because in the letter at the beginning she said to her mother, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written to you before. I really have no excuse, I just didn’t get to it,’ and she said, ‘I know you’ve been anxiously waiting for a letter from me.’ Of course, my grandmother never got it.”

Apparently no one realized the letter had gone missing, either, she added.

“They never knew what happened to it and we don’t know what happened to it either, but we have it now. It’s just been a lot of fun to read it and reminisce about everybody,” she said. “I mean, 83 years is a long time.”

Miriam McMichael became Miriam McMichael Robinson, and she had two sons. She was 98 years old when she died in 1996. The family name's spelling has also changed over the years, picking up an extra "a."

MacMichael plans to send the letter to Daniel Robinson, her aunt’s surviving son. He lives in Massachusetts.

“We’ve been e-mailing back and forth and stuff about it and I just said as soon as I’m done playing with it, he should really have it,” she said. “[She] was his mother, so he should really have it.”

MacMichael appreciates having the tangible link to her relative, saying written communication from the past makes her relatives “very present.”

“Isn’t it too bad that we’ve gotten away from writing letters? Because I also have a lot of letters from my grandmother on my mother’s … side of the family and it’s just so great to be able to get those letters out and read them and know about people and the family that I never knew and read letter from my grandmother that died when I was 13,” she said.

“It just gives you so much of your family history and it gives you so much of a feeling of your family, and isn’t it a shame that we’ve gotten away from that?”