She had been married to a Barry, whose mother had been named Phyllis. She had never met Jack Crawford but she had to know if this was the lost relative her husband had sometimes spoken of with sadness.
"You never expect it to be your family," she said.
Barry had passed away the month before, aged 81 - never to know the his uncle's story.
But Phyllis had another child, daughter Pam, now 78 and the last living blood relative to have known Jack.
"I rang her up at 10 o'clock at night, I was so excited. I just had to ring her up. I wanted to tell my husband - I said 'Barry! Barry! You've got to see this' - but of course I couldn't," Deborah said.
Despite the late hour, Pam answered the phone and after listening said she could not sleep that night.
Pam was only eight when Jack left for war. She was living on Ulster St with his mother Elizabeth, sister Phyllis and nephew Barry (her mother and brother).
The family were no strangers to loss. Jack's father John had died in 1940 after an accident in the family cowshed. It was an unbefitting end for the master carver who had worked on the Titanic and carved a bedroom suite for the Governor General.
Phyllis' husband had also recently died of septicaemia, leaving her a widow with two children.
Coincidentally, Phyllis would later go on to remarry to an airman of the war.
Pam's son printed a transcript of the journal the next day and had it bound into a book, which Pam said she had revisited many times.
"I never knew him as a man. We used to play football with him. I can see it as I read through the diary ... at the beginning he wasn't a drinker, but he was by the end.
"I never knew he played the mouth organ. It's been very nice to get this diary and it's told a story we never knew. I always wondered how he managed. He was very young and he had never been out of the Waikato before the war."
She said it was nice to know he had managed to grab a little bit of life during the war and that his decision to marry after only a few weeks was the action of a man determined to live life to the fullest when surviving the week was never a certainty.
"He probably knew he was going to die, the way it was going, and you snatch happiness while you can.
"The diary speaks for itself - he lived life for the moment," Pam said.
She said Jack's widow's decision to write an epitaph 29 years later reflected the impact their short marriage had had.
"I thought it was quite nice and quite funny that she waited so long to do it, she kept thinking about him."
The sober man who recorded his friends' deaths with something like detachment was a far cry from the man Pam remembered driving his tiny motorbike engine-powered car around Hamilton.
"That thing sat in the garage for years and years until it disappeared one day. We can just remember him being fun."
She said the family never knew Jack kept a journal and it would have been a comfort had the rest of the family read it.
"What's really sad is his sister never got to read it, my mother would have gained comfort from it."
She said it was 12 months after the crash that the war office finally confirmed his death. It was a tragedy that was rarely mentioned often in the Crawford household.
"It was a very traumatic thing. He was the only son. It just wasn't talked about. It was too sad. Too many people had died."
Pam still has a number of items from Jack, including gifts, letters, photos and the war medals, which were sent to his mother in 1950.
"Perhaps they didn't dish out the medals until after war. He got the Defence Medal, the War Medal, the France and Germany Star, the New Zealand Medal, and the 1939-1945 Star. There was also the medal sent from King George the Sixth."
Pam said her travelling days were over but that she would write to Rose and to John Herbert to thank them for the research and time put into transcribing the journal, and the efforts they made to find his relatives.
"I think this diary is just wonderful. We never knew much about what he did when he went over to do his training.
"It's amazing that they would have gone to all this trouble to find us."
Pam has three sons and four grandchildren with husband Pat. They have all read the journal.
The whole family had believed Jack was a rear gunner rather than a navigator, and she had even taken her grandchildren to see the Lancaster at the MOTAT museum to show them where Jack would have sat.
John said he was thrilled to hear two relatives had been found, and said Waikato Museum curator Dan Morrow was interested in the diary.