In search for a hero’s family, a lesson in integrity

When Amanda Kehler, who runs the Prairie Pickers Cafe and Antique Store in Steinbach, Manitoba(about 90 miles northwest of Warroad), was out antiquing a week or so ago, she thought the stack of old newspapers and documents she bought for a dollar was a pretty good deal.

It might have been a priceless one because this letter from Earl Sorel was in it.

Sorel’s letter to the sister of the man who saved his life described the heroism of Gordon Rochford in the three-day battle at Vimy Ridge in France in World War I. Rochford paid with his.

“The barrage was like a thunderstorm and we were trotting at a good pace. We had gone about 1200 yards,” he writes.” “‘Bang’. I felt a sharp burn in my back and left arm. The next thing I remember was Gordon pulling me in a shell hole and he said ‘stay there’.”

Kehler knew what she had to do; she had to find the family of both Sorel and Rochford.

Sorel, she found out, died in 1969 and had no children. A nephew had a son, but he’s dead too, she tells the BBC.

In about a week’s time, with media and the Internet pitching in, she found four relatives on both sides, all of whom said the letter should be put in a museum.

She rejected all offers to sell the letter, even though that’s the whole idea of antiquing. Find something, buy it, sell it for more.

“It was never about the money my friends,” she writes on Facebook. “Calvin and I are parents. We have sons that look to us to teach them. In the past week, they got a lesson on integrity.”