Couple tries to solve Christmas card mystery

A couple near Tampa is looking for the name of an 85-year-old woman who sent them an unsigned Christmas card detailing the good times that she spent in their house when she was a child.

The woman wrote that some of the best years of her life were spent in the house in the Seminole Heights neighborhood.

“I moved there when I was eight years old! I am now eighty-five! Not a Christmas goes by that I don’t go back in my memory of those war years, our gatherings, laughter, and tears too, but all in all they were good memories,” the woman wrote in the Christmas card that she mailed to Jeremy Beauchamp and his husband, Dale.

The couple moved into the home two years ago.

“I opened it and my first thought was — this is so strange to get a letter from someone this in-depth, you know, and it did not have a name on it,” Jeremy Beauchamp told WTSP. “So I started reading it and almost got teary-eyed because it was very touching.”

The woman wrote that she often talks about the time that spent in that house.

“Please forgive an old lady at Christmas with her heart still at 9th Street. Enjoy your home — Merry Christmas! ‘I'll be home for Christmas — if only in my dreams,” the woman wrote.

Beauchamp said he hopes to continue making those kinds of memories in the 1925 bungalow-style house.

“There’s been almost 100 Christmases in this house. That’s a lot of memories,” Beauchamp said.

They hope to meet the woman who sent the card.

“We’ve done marriage records, we did the census,” Beauchamp told the television station. “I mean you name it, we started going through it.”

“Then we found that there was at one time during the census a 9-year-old girl that lived here at the same time period that this person was talking about,” Beauchamp said.

The couple sent a card back to the address where they believe the woman may live. He said they would love to let her come back to visit the home.

“Christmas [in 2021] would be nice,” he said.