THE LOST LETTER by Sabra Petersmann [email protected]

For Christmas the year I was 16, my favorite aunt, the family genealogist, gave me a letter written in 1860 by my great- grandmother Sabra Miner STURGIS (1815-1895). Although Sabra left behind nearly 150 letters (and wrote perhaps 1,000 more in her 80 years), this one was special. She was writing to her niece, Sabra VANCE, about the unusual name they shared. And it was my name too. Even when my parents feared they had burdened me with a name too strange to avoid the cruelty of other children, I knew it was right for me.

The letter helped me appreciate the tradition in the Connecticut MINER family of the name Sabra, a name once as familiar as Linda or Nancy. I read it over many times. But in the years of youth and college, marriage and moves, the letter went missing. I searched for it but finally saw that through my carelessness, this precious piece of my family history had been lost. How I blamed myself! I called myself irresponsible, disrespectful and undeserving of the gift of my name.

Then a year ago, I decided to get serious about telling Sabra's story in a book. From her viewpoint in Lindenville, Ashtabula County, Ohio, she watched the John Brown conspiracy and the Civil War unfold. She endured the loss of her Methodist circuit rider husband. She raised sons and agonized over whether to give her permission for them to enlist in the army. Sabra left behind all this information for a reason: so that someone would be able to look into her thoughts both public (the letters) and private (her diary) and know the workings of a woman whose long life spanned nearly all of the important events of the 19th century.

Surrounded by the richness of her surviving letters, I still reminded myself sadly of what I called "The Lost Sabra Letter." I talked to Sabra in my mind, asking her for a small miracle; even if the letter had somehow disintegrated, perhaps she might be able to reconstitute it and make it reappear. But as the technical aspects of the book took over, I thought of it less and less. Keeping track of the nearly 1,000 relatives, neighbors and national figures who appear in the letters and drawing a time line of where she was in each period of her life (she traveled more frequently than her great-granddaughter who has access to airplanes!) required all my attention.

Then on New Year's Day 2001, I was getting up from my computer to take a break when an invisible hand seemed to take mine and lead me to the basement door. Without a second thought I rushed down the steps to a stack of storage boxes untouched since my husband and I moved into this house in 1977. I pushed aside the top two and began ripping open the third. With an inexplicable conviction I began pulling things out. Finally, confidently, but with no idea why I was doing it, I reached deep into the box and pulled out an old blue notebook. There tucked safely inside a folder was the "lost" letter which begins:

Dear Sabra, Do you think you have a pretty name? I remember when a child I was so displeased with it, but in later years I love it much. It is short and easily spoken. Well, as I wrote it just now, I was thinking how many there now are bearing [that name] and hoping they might honor it much more than I. . .

I have no doubt that Sabra found it appropriate to bring forward the letter about our shared name at the beginning of this new year, this new millennium, to remind me of the world of infinite possibility, of the living connection between generations and of the futility of self-blame.

Oh yes. And she really, really wants her story told.