Here is an email I received this morning, out of the blue:
Dear Ms Galt: I have come into possession of a small notebook once kept by Edith Galt (1917-1961). I would be happy to return the notebook to the Galt family if you would like it back. I traced Edith\'s family via Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com and Google, and am contacting you because your contact information was the easiest for me to quickly find. The notebook is about 3x4 inches and contains notes and accounts that Edith kept while at Grinnell College and in China. Wedged among the yellowed pages is a small photograph of a young woman. The book was found, years ago, in the attic of farmhouse near Tama, Iowa, which is about 30 miles north of Grinnell. The elderly woman who found it is no longer sure exactly where the house was or if it is still standing. She found the notebook while sorting for her own move. I\'m happy to mail the book to any address you provide.
What a thrill: This is what the internet and email are supposed to provide: surprises, astonishment, and gratitude. Feeling all those lively emotions, I wrote back to this kind, honorable women:
It doesn't surprise me that the notebook was found near Grinnell.
According to my rather sketchy knowledge of the Galt family, my husband Fran's
father Ralph was raised in China by missionary parents, both of whom came
from Iowa. They returned to the U.S. for Ralph to attend Grinnell.
Once graduated , Ralph married a lovely young woman from New England, Louisa (named for Louisa May Alcott), and the two of them, in their turn, took a ship for missionary work in China.
This brings us up to the outbreak of World War II, during which Louisa and Ralph were exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war and were allowed to return on a slow boat around the tip of South America and through the Port of New York. Once in the U.S. Ralph refused to register for the draft. This was 1942, in the midst of World War II. As "draft refuser," or conscientious objector, Ralph was imprisoned in a federal prison in West Virginia from September 1942 to early 1944, a total of 21 months.
When he was incarcerated, his wife Louisa was already pregnant. She gave birth to Fran's brother Lester in 1943 while Ralph was still in prison. Once he was released on parole, the family moved to Shawnee Mission, Oklahoma, where Ralph was state director for the Christian Rural Oversea's Program, or CROP. The couple's second child, the son Francis, was born in 1947. Francis would eventually become my husband.
Interestingly enough, Fran himself refused the draft and spent two years, from 1966-68, in Federal prison at Springfield Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, Missouri. He was given the job of typist to two employees: a prison psychologist and a jail inspector. Released in 1968, Fran was later paroled by President Gerald Ford in 1976.
Grandfather Galt, the original missionary to China, and his wife Alti Cummings, had three children, Ralph, and two sisters, one of whom was Edith, whose diary has been discovered in an attic near Grinnell. It's truly astonishing how in the years before the internet or even transoceanic telephone, so many of my husband's family conducted their lives overseas. Perhaps it's a clue that until he met me, Fran did not cross an ocean, but remained close to the Midwest where his family settled before and after they took the long boat to China.
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