Michael Archer was gutting the last unrenovated closet in his London, Ontario, house when the dust cleared and he saw something on the floor.
“When the dust settled, I looked down and there was a yellow letter laying in the rubble,” he told CTV London.
It was dated August 13, 1929, and signed by a man named Charles Slater. Slater worked on Great Lakes freighters and had written to his father from Port Arthur or Fort William, the twin cities that later became Thunder Bay. In it, he explained why he didn’t know when he’d be home.
A look into history
“He was writing to his father saying, ‘I don’t know when we’re coming home because there’s no grain coming out of the west,’” Archer said.
That was two months before the Stock Market crash. Slater was describing grain not moving, and had no idea what was coming.
The Archers tried to find the Slater family at the time and got nowhere. So, Michael’s wife Christina put the letter away.
“I had this letter stored and protected away for 25 years,” she said.
Last week she tried again, this time by asking for help publicly. “I guess it just occurred to me to try the media to see if I could find any descendants,” she said.
A genealogist stumbles upon the story
Marisa Cooper, a genealogist in the area, happened to be scrolling Facebook when Christina’s post came up.
“I knew I could help,” Cooper said.
She worked backward through the family. “Charles Slater had three full siblings, four step siblings,” she said. “He had one half sibling, a woman named Audrey Slater who married into the Power family.”
That line led to Aaron Powers, Charles Slater’s great-nephew.
“I am married to Aaron Powers,” a woman named Laurie Powers told CTV. “It’s his grandmother’s brother who wrote the letter.”
They had never heard of him.
“We were really surprised,” Laurie said. “He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s the long-lost uncle we’ve always wanted.’”
The Archers met the Slaters to hand the letter over. Christina had done more than preserve it. “She painted us a beautiful picture that’s got documentation from all the different parts of the story,” Laurie said.
The pinpoint detail
The letter itself has one detail that places Slater precisely in his moment: he recommended his father read a book.
“It includes a book he recommended to his father called All Quiet on the Western Front by a German,” Laurie said.
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel had been published in German in January of that year and in English translation that spring. It was the most talked-about book in the world in 1929, and a young man on a stalled grain freighter had already read it and thought his father should too.
Slater married, but never had children. By his family’s account he did well for himself, and he died in 1984.
“Charles Slater had three full siblings,” Cooper said, “and out of all of them, the letter found its way to one grandson of one half-sister, ninety-seven years after it was written and twenty-five after it fell out of a wall.”
