Written on wafer-thin blue paper, folded, creased and faded, the first letter was in places difficult to decipher, but the very first sentence alone spoke to me over a gap of more than one hundred years. My Dear Sister, Weary is the task to me to address another letter to you, for so hopeless seems the prospect of my receiving any answer. Who was this woman crying out in despair from the other side of the world to her unnamed sister? The accidental discovery of seven old letters in a bureau started Joyce Stevens on a thirty-year search. What had happened to her great-great-aunt Ellen, who emigrated from Portsea to Australia in 1841? Here we see the results of that search.