She found letters more than 100 years old. We found descendants of those who wrote them.

It all started, this genealogical mystery, with Fran Redic finding a bunch of very, very old stuff in her personal library in a front room of her Myers Park home.

She was looking for something on the shelves, populated partially with antique books that are really just for decoration, and stumbled across a journal filled with entries by an “L.J. Bell.” The heading on the top of the first page read: “Notes of a Northern Tour in the Fall of 1855.” Tucked inside its pages was a very old photograph of a big white house that, according to the handwriting on the bottom of it, was called “Roseland” and located in Accomac, Virginia.

As Fran continued rummaging, she also found tucked inside other old books a collection of letters, many of which were addressed to a “Miss Nancy E. Bell” living Spartanburg, South Carolina, and signed by “Grandpa.” Most were postmarked between 1915 and 1917.

She discovered all of these items a few years ago. At the time, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember from where or how she got that particular stack of antique books, though she would have guessed they’d probably been in her home here in Charlotte for at least 20 years.

Since this find, Fran had been noodling what, if anything, she could find out about this family of Bells — though obviously it was not at the top of her to-do list.

Then one day earlier this year, Fran was walking on the beach with her friend Ann Caulkins, a former publisher of The Charlotte Observer. Somehow, the journal and the letters came up. Fran was intrigued by the prospect of connecting with someone who could track down the Bells’ descendants. Ann, her old Observer instincts kicking in, was intrigued by the potential storytelling opportunity.

So at the beginning of this past summer, Ann contacted me, and put me in touch with Fran. During our first conversation, Fran filled in some more details and then said, plainly: “I’d love to give this stuff to you and see what you can figure out.”

Well, thanks in large part to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the mystery was solved with relative ease.

But it wasn’t without a significant plot twist.

After the library helped us track down the granddaughter of the recipient of all those letters — Susan Reed of Black Hawk, Colorado — I organized a video call so Fran and Susan could meet. Midway through, Fran was stunned by the sudden realization that she knew Susan. Or, that she at least knew of her.

That the mystery’s solution, in a way, had been right in front of her all along.

‘Dead or alive, she’ll find ’em’

For a variety of reasons, it took me about six weeks (and a referral from noted Charlotte community historian Tom Hanchett) to finally bring the journal and the letters to staffers at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room.

It took them about six minutes to find clues that ultimately led us to Susan.

No, seriously. In short order, Carolina Room manager John O’Connor and librarian Shelia Bumgarner had started sketching out a family tree around the granddaughter — Nancy “Nan” E. Bell — that included the names of her father (Charles D. Bell); her mother (Lillian); and the grandfather who wrote many of the letters (William T. R. Bell).

And while John acknowledged quickly that the content of the letters was pretty mundane, he seemed fairly interested in the journal.

At a glance, it was clear that the diary spanned nearly 200 pages and was handwritten by an individual who’d logged musings over the course of a month-long journey to places including Baltimore; Boston; New York City; and Montreal in Canada. The timeframe for it was less than six years before the start of the Civil War.

They would need to dig in a little to establish a connection between the 1855 journal and the 1910s letters.

But after a few more minutes, Shelia stood up from the conference table and announced: “OK, I’m gonna leave you to it and I’ll go answer the phones. Because dead or alive, she’ll find ’em.”

Shelia was referring, in this case, to library assistant Meghan Bowden — and she was right. Within a few more minutes, Meghan had used their library-level access to Ancestry’s website to determine things like Grandpa’s birthdate (Sept. 1, 1843); and Mom Lillian’s last name (Roberson); and that there was evidence “Nan” had married a man from New York.

“I need to just play around with that (information) for a bit,” Meghan said. “Usually I can find an obituary and then sort of see if anyone’s still living. ...

“The diary’s the biggest question mark. The rest is pretty easy to find.”

She said she’d follow up as soon as she knew something about descendants. This was on a Friday morning. By late the following Monday morning, Meghan had emailed me both a fairly comprehensive family tree and a definitive answer about how the journal was related to it.

Connecting the genealogical dots

According to Meghan’s research, the journal was written by Lorenzo J. Bell, older brother of Nan’s grandfather (William, the letter-writer).

Lorenzo’s first name didn’t appear anywhere within its pages, but fortunately he at one point acknowledged his birthday, which was the clue Meghan needed to confirm his identity.

His observations during his journey — covering thoughts on everything traveling by steamship to interactions in New York with freed Black men who had become attorneys (Lorenzo was a lawyer himself) — were interesting enough that Meghan thought the journal was a potentially rich resource for historical research.

But she had good news about the descendants of the Bells, too.

“There are quite a few,” Meghan wrote. She identified “Nan’s” first and second husbands, and her three children, including an eldest daughter from the second marriage. That daughter married a man named William Benight and also had three children — one of whom was the aforementioned Susan, of Black Hawk, Colorado.

“Susan Benight Reed,” Meghan explained, “and her husband are likely still living in the Denver area.”

Meghan didn’t know how to contact Susan, but did some internet detective work to identify one of Susan’s daughters and her place of employment. I reached out to her business email address, and although it must have seemed off-the-wall, whatever I said worked.

Susan’s daughter responded in less than a day. I was in touch with Susan soon after that.

It’s hard to predict how someone will react to something like this. Not everybody is interested in genealogy. Susan, however, greeted the news of the family artifacts with enthusiasm. Her grandmother, Nan, had died in 1970, and she and her siblings had never known much about the maternal line on that side of the family.

“We would definitely love to see all of it,” she said when we first talked by phone.

I mailed Susan the letters. Meghan, who had recommended the journal be placed in an archive, scanned the journal and emailed Susan the PDFs so Susan could decide.

Finally, after Susan had a chance to look everything over and let everything sink in, I arranged a video call that gave Fran, Meghan and Susan a chance to meet for the first time — and that gave Fran and Susan a chance to have a revelation.

‘OK ... this is very strange’

It started pretty uneventfully.

Fran explained how she found the documents. Meghan explained how she found Susan. Susan explained her positive reaction to their findings.

“She actually carried on this tradition,” Susan said of the letters. “She traveled quite a bit, and she would send me letters and postcards. So it was kind of fun to see that. I’m like, Oh, that’s something that started when she was young.”

But about 20 minutes into the call came a twist.

Susan mentioned her last name being Reed and her maiden name being Benight, details I hadn’t told Fran in advance.

“OK ... this is very strange,” Fran said, suddenly. “In my mother’s side of the family, we have Reads. But they are R-e-a-d. But my father passed away when I was in college, and my mother — she’s remarried to Bob Benight? Do you —”

“Yeah!” Susan said, looking incredulous. “Chris?”

“Yeah,” Fran said.

“You’re that Fran??” Susan asked, looking even more astonished.

“Yes!” Fran responded.

They would have some more explaining to do to me and Meghan, as we had no idea what in the world they were talking about. But once they unpacked it for us, the mystery had apparently been solved:

It is highly likely, Susan told us, that her grandmother (Nancy Bell) had kept the journal and the letters in a box filled with antique books until she died in 1970. Susan’s aunt, Rosamund Benight, likely ended up with the box. Rosamund, who was married to Bob Benight, died in 1985. A few years later, Bob remarried a widowed woman named Chris.

Chris, as it happens, is Fran’s mother.

The assumption now is that Fran, who had wanted to populate her home library with some antique books, was gifted the box of Nancy Bell’s decades ago — during which time Fran had completely forgotten where they came from.

At first, Fran was slightly embarrassed. “I feel a little silly,” she wrote to us in an email afterward, “that you went to all of this work only to find out that there was a family connection — if only by marriage. The only thing worse would have been if they had been traced back to my own family!!”

But she also could have done nothing with these otherwise-forgotten treasures.

Instead, Susan now has information the family didn’t have before about the maternal line beyond her grandmother. Susan also said that while she’s always thought of her grandmother when she’s heard a mention of North or South Carolina, she’s never explored either state; she now plans to, in the near future, having been inspired by all of this.

In addition, the Library of Virginia now has Lorenzo Bell’s journal in its archives, Fran and Susan having agreed that’s where it belongs.

And perhaps you’ve now learned something from this, too: that the public library does stuff like this every day.

“This sort of thing is definitely more exciting than the average request for me,” Meghan told me over the summer, when she was returning the letters to me after having done her research on them. “Just ’cause it’s sort of atypical and ... I love a good mystery.”

“I think a lot of people don’t know what we do,” she continued, “what we offer. I even had a friend like I’ve known for years who was like, ‘Oh you do genealogy research just for anyone?’”

“I was like, ‘Yup,’” Meghan recalled, smiling, “and it’s free.”