ESQUIMALT – The first time Laura opened the box was shortly after she inherited it from her sister. "She probably picked it up at an antique store or secondhand store," Laura guesses.

Laura appreciated the wooden writing box's plush purple interior, which included compartments that held a few ink bottles and about a dozen century-old photographs. "I thought, 'Geez! Who are these people?'" she recalls. "It was rather fascinating but…"

But they weren't her family. So Laura put the box on a shelf where it sat for a few years. "I'd be watching TV and think, 'I really should do something about that box," she laughs. "Now that I'm retired I thought 'OK, I'm doing something with the box!'"

The box included not just one secret compartment but two. The second contained a pair of portraits and a folder and a letter. "I thought 'Wow! This is cool,'" Laura remembers. "When I pulled out the letter it was dated 1898!"

When she unfolds the delicate pages, you can see the precise handwriting that says it was sent from the Turks Islands. It was written to "Mrs. M. McCoubrey" in St. John's, Newfoundland, and signed "W. Stanley Jones." 

"He was writing to say thank you," Laura explains. "For letting [him] know about her husband's death." The husband was Dick McCoubrey.

Laura says she was intrigued. "It's a history mystery!" 

She started searching online, but didn't find the answers she was looking for. So she contacted a newspaper in Newfoundland and made the front page. "I just got bombarded with emails," she says. 

They were mostly messages from people who were interested in the photos or the bottles. There was just one clue about the owner of the box that brought the mystery back to the West Coast. "The lady moved to Victoria after the death of her husband," Laura says. "And then when she was 80, married her high school sweetheart."

Its seems like the box belonged to a Clara who married a Thomas Morry. 

Now Laura is hoping – perhaps with your help – that she can solve the history mystery close to home. "Ideally I'd like the box to go back to a family member," she smiles. "If I could do that for somebody else, that would be kinda neat!"