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A routine check of donated goods has unexpectedly turned up a couple of wartime letters.

An effort is underway to try to locate any relatives of the serviceman who wrote them 80 years ago.

"I was very glad to receive your letter before I leave here, not that I know where or when I'm going," Robert Ballantine wrote.

His lost sentences have surfaced fresh as a part of America's story from the early 1940s.

"You can imagine how anxious we all are," he wrote. "To know what's going to happen to us."

The letters home were written and mailed during World War II. One was composed at sea, postmarked Jan. 27, 1943.

"You'll hear from me as soon as I am located someplace else which I hope is soon," the letter reads. "Yours till I hit an oceanfront."

The other letter was mailed four months earlier from the Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, Illinois.

Both were discovered inside a distinctive box that was among the donations at the Goodwill store in Bellevue, Kentucky, over the Labor Day weekend.

Both letters were addressed to Miss Elizabeth W. Smith at a P.O. box in Bristol, Pennsylvania.

Navy seaman Robert Ballantine was a gunners mate, 3rd class, aboard the USS LST-385.

"And the ship was part of D-Day," said Michael Flannery, who handles public information for Goodwill Industries.

He does not know how the letters to a suburb of Philly ended up in Northern Kentucky.

But he is trying to find out.

"Something like this, the family would want," he said. "You'd want the grandson to be able to hold his grandfather's letter and read his words."

Much of the wording in the stateside letter was light-hearted.

"I have a swell beard," he wrote. "You ought to see it."

Someone at Goodwill remarked how treasures are found there all the time, but nothing like that.

"Hope you'll excuse the delay in answering your letters. Glad to hear you had such a nice Christmas," he wrote.

Social media has been abuzz about the find.

But there has been no connection with descendants of the writer so far.

"Till next time. Love, R. A. Ballantine."

Goodwill is looking for Ballantine's next of kin to have the letters returned to them.

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