The ID card of Kathryn M. Perata from 1949 was found in a purse purchased at the Thames Hospice Shop by Whangārei woman Morgan McCaskill.
The ID card of Kathryn M. Perata from 1949 was found in a purse purchased at the Thames Hospice Shop by Whangārei woman Morgan McCaskill.
A purse acquired in a Thames op shop containing an ID card with an old photo of a US worker sparked an extraordinary act of providence for her relatives, as the purchaser sought to find out more about the mystery woman.
Morgan McCaskill, from Whangārei, made the surprising discovery of the ID card, date-stamped 1949, along with a photo of a woman and a man atop an elephant.
The identification belonged to a woman named Kathryn M. Perata, and was issued by the US Treasury Department for the Morse Export and Import Company, at which Perata worked as a translator.
Morgan McCaskill with the purse.
“After realising that I had found something pretty special, I wondered how the photo of the woman from San Francisco had ended up in my purse,” said McCaskill.
“I grew up in Thames,” she added, “and I had been back for a visit earlier in the year when I bought the handbag from the Hospice Shop.”
Intrigued, she turned to social media to connect the dots and identify if Kathryn M. Perata had any local links.
“I thought I’d post something on Facebook and hope that word of mouth would help find some answers,” said McCaskill.
“My cousin and his partner are hairdressers in Thames, and they shared my post to the local page, and Patti Clark saw the post, and my cousin does her hair!”
The photo of Patti Clark and her husband on an elephant in Thailand from 1984 was found alongside the ID of her late mother Kathryn.
Patti Clark then got in touch with McCaskill and the two pieced things together. It was then that the quantum entanglement between Clark and her mother became apparent.
“She messaged me and said that was her on the elephant, and that Kathryn, from San Francisco, was her mother - who sadly passed in 1974,” said McCaskill.
Clark said: “It was Mother’s Day and I was talking to my sister. She said she had to do something and would call right back, so I spent a couple of minutes just scrolling on FB [Facebook], mindlessly waiting for her to call back.
“I was scrolling and suddenly up pops a picture of my mother! I almost dropped my phone. I quickly commented, ‘That’s my mother’. I didn’t even know who had posted it at that point, it was only after I made the comment that I realised it was Tyla, the guy who cuts my hair! And I thought, what the hell is Tyla doing with a picture of my mother? It made no sense.
“So I followed his post [on the Thames/Coromandel Grapevine Facebook page] and realised that it had come from his cousin, Morgan, who had bought my purse several weeks before and found the picture in the pocket of the purse. I hadn’t used that purse for decades and hadn’t seen that ID for decades.
Patti Clark reunited with the ID from 1949 that belonged to her late mother Kathryn.
“The amazing thing was that I had been talking to my sister about our mother - on Mother’s Day! And that photo popped up and the only reason I saw it is because I’m friends with Tyla on Facebook and he posted in the Grapevine just as I had been scrolling. If he had done it later, I would have missed it. But the timing was perfect.”
It was then deduced that Patti’s husband donated the handbag to the Hospice Shop.
“We had some back and forth,” said McCaskill. “Patti’s husband didn’t check the handbag before donating.”
Feeling that the best course of action was to return the purse’s contents, McCaskill said she “sent them [the photo and ID] back to her [Clark], as photos of her parents, who died young, are very rare, so I wanted to give that memory back.”
According to Patti Clark, the implausible events continued with the returned purse arriving by mail at an opportune time: “In a wonderful postscript Morgan posted it back, and I went to my mailbox on my way out the door to get my hair cut with Tyla - full circle!
