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Transcript

"Two sisters separated by the great Atlantic Ocean, never to see each other again. Hannah in Ohio, writing in Welsh, would block the ink with her tears leaving her daughter to finish in English. So she made a quilt for Sarah Ellen and my grandmother, who treasured this comforter and sadness threatened.

When a photograph of Susanne, Hannah's granddaughter, reached Wales, Sarah Ellen tried to persuade me to write to her, but I had better things to do.

In time the quilt passed to my mother and eventually to me. It was then I started thinking about Susanne. Was she still alive? Did she know about me? I searched and searched but it seemed an impossible task.

Then one day the phone rang, "Hi there!" said a woman's voice, "I've found my father Idwal's home in Llanbrynmair, and the owner remembered that you had shown him an old photograph of the house".

I suddenly felt my spine go cold, "So you're Idwal's daughter?"
"Yes",
"Are you Susanne?", a long silence then, "Who are you?" "Your cousin our grandmothers were sisters".

Susanne was dumbfounded as she thought she had no family at all beside her husband and children.

She now has an extended family, my sister's and mine. We have spent many happy times getting to know each other in our homes in Wales and Florida.

But that first time when we spread the quilt on the bed, for Susanne and her husband Don, we knew there were two sisters somewhere nodding to each other united in their shared tears of happiness above the quilt."