During the renovation of a house in New Jersey, I discovered a collection of old letters in the attic.

At first, they appeared to be simply boxes of aging paper, handwritten pages, envelopes, stamps, postmarks, photographs, and documents that had survived quietly for decades. But I could not simply throw them away.

It represents the turning point of the discovery, the moment when these letters could have disappeared, but instead began their journey toward preservation and eventually became the foundation of the book.

I began preserving them, cleaning and organizing the collection, and placing the correspondence in chronological order.

 

Slowly, a story began to emerge.

These were not just old letters.

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They were the private voices of James and Margaret Wiley, documenting their relationship, their family, their separation, and the extraordinary years surrounding World War II.

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Some letters captured ordinary moments of life. Others reflected the uncertainty of wartime separation and James’s service in the Pacific aboard USS Libra (AKA-12).

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Together, they created something neither James nor Margaret could have imagined while writing them:

A historical record of two lives preserved through their own words.

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More than eight decades later, almost a century those voices were still there, waiting to be heard.

That discovery eventually became the foundation for: 

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LETTERS ACROSS THE PACIFIC

A True Story of Love, War, and Hope