German Documents Reunited With Owner

This thread made my day!

I always am on the lookout for correspondence/documents/ephemera naming unusual (or at least uncommon) surnames. It's a lot more likely to be able to reunite someone's descendants with their relative's items if they are not a Schmidt, Wagner, or Hoffman.

In my family there are Wentzells, Denners, Wallners, Gesslers, Murawskis, Nowotnys, Van Koenens, and Juergings to keep an eye out for. At least they're not very common names, but I have found a few of those names on pre WWII covers I've found for sale, but so far no-one in my extended family knows them.

Some of the many covers I have also contain letters, even photographs. Many are sad (war-related) but a few have some happier stories. I have emailed or sent letters to probably about a dozen possible descendants, gleaned from Internet searches, but have not received positive results.

I dream of the day I, too, can reunite someone with a little bit of their past history!

--Jim Wentzell
stampguyaps177-681
WW collector (especially postal history to around 1950)

In a similar vein, I have the photographs my grandfather took while he was on the Edmonton trail to the Klondike Gold Rush. On many of the photos, he captioned the names of the individuals he photographed. I've posted them to the internet in the hope that somebody researching their family history will discover an unknown photo of an ancestor. I've had some success which makes it worthwhile.

Robert