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Welcome to
History Buff, a blog for history lovers everywhere! History Buff brings
news stories about archaeology from around the world together on one site.
From finds in ancient Egypt to new discoveries in anthropology, History
Buff wants to know. And feel free to stop by History Buff's
Author Interviews for Q&As with authors of historical fiction. Enjoy!
**Every summer I disappear for several months to various archaeological sites around the world. So for the next 8 weeks or so (until August), History Buff will only be updated a few times a week and with fewer stories. However, as soon as I return, plentiful posting will resume. Have a wonderful summer!!!!!!!!**
As an
historical fiction writer I am fascinated by news stories featuring the
past as it's unearthed and reimagined and brought to life. I spend a
large quantity of time searching for news in archaeology and history.
Once in a great while a new archaeological discovery will act as an inspiration
for what I'm currently writing. But most of the time the news stories
I read are simply interesting tidbits of history. Unfortunately, I have
disallowed comments because I travel so frequently that I can neither
monitor nor respond to them. But I would still love to share the history
that I find fascinating each day. So welcome! And feel free to visit my
website at www.michellemoran.com
or contact me at authormichellemoran at hotmail dot com.
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Mystery of Aunt Pete's message in a bottle solved by soldier's grandson
When "Aunt Pete" wrote to her soldier nephew in France in 1918, she had no idea what she was starting. Her letter began life inside a US mail bag, spent almost 90 years as a message in a bottle and ended up generating an avalanche of transatlantic emails.
Earlier this month, The Independent published an article reporting that Aunt Pete's letter, sent from Oklahoma City in July 1918, had been found by French archaeologists in a spring-topped beer bottle near old trench lines in Lorraine.
The letter – almost perfectly preserved – gave a jaunty account of the mood in the midwest of the United States four months from the end of the First World War. But who was Aunt Pete? And who was her nephew soldier, Sgt Morres Vickers Liepman, of D Battery of the 130th Field Artillery?
It was known that Sgt Liepman survived the war but little else emerged from US government records.
The story, spotted by an American reader of The Independent in France, produced a flurry of emails and calls to the French government archeological agency, L'Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Preventives (INRAP). One of the calls came from Sgt Liepman's grandson, Cecil Liepman, 56, an investment manager in Houston,Texas.
"My first thought was that granddad had had his five minutes of fame at last," he said. "I knew him very well. He died in 1980 but he never spoke to us much about the First World War.
"The finding of this letter has brought distant parts of the family together and it has made us all think, and read, about that war so long ago. If a German shell had fallen on granddad, none of us would have existed."
