My wife and I inherited an old trunk full of World War II documents, photographs and postcards when my wife's grandfather, Jerome Davis, died. Davis was a scholar, Presbyterian minister and World War II correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper.

Among the treasures I found were photographic glass transparencies of pre-war Japan scenes, postcards of war-torn Leningrad (St. Petersburg), a letter signed by Eleanor Roosevelt and a German soldier's cap emblazoned with the infamous SS Death's Head.

What caught my eye, though, was a set of five German "soldbuchs" (soldier books). German soldiers used these small paper booklets to collect their pay. The documents also listed the military units that the bearer served in, documented citations earned and served as basic identity papers.

Photo courtesy of Peter Bakke Franz Lutzky's soldbuch, a paper booklet used to collect pay. Zoom

It appears Davis collected the sold-buchs while reporting for the Toronto Star in Leningrad in late 1944, after the three-year German siege of the city. Then Davis traveled west with the advancing Russian front.

I firmly believe that Davis did not confiscate these materials as war trophies but gathered the soldbuchs so that they could be returned one day to the families of the dead or dying soldiers.

Many German soldbuchs are sold for profit with no attempt to return them to their rightful owners. When I came across the five soldbuchs, thoughts of selling them on eBay entered my mind, but I decided that returning them would be the right thing to do. But how?

How could I ever find homes for these fading time capsules? Some scholars estimate that there were more than 18 million soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the German army, during World War II - how could I possibly find relatives after 60 years?

Using the Web was my first thought. The Internet has obvious communication capacities that were not available even a decade ago. It now has worldwide reach and includes many sites devoted to genealogy, history and war.

I know a bit of German, so with the help of a free online translation service at babelfish.altavista.com, I was able to glean from the soldbuchs each of the soldier's names, birth dates and birthplaces. I posted this information on a genealogy Web site, crossed my fingers, and waited.

Within a few weeks I got a reply.

Annelies Windisch (Lutzky) of Bernhardsthal, Austria, wrote me an e-mail indicating that a friend had told her about my posting. We corresponded for several weeks. Working together, we finally determined that the soldbuch of "Obergefreiter" Franz Lutzky was indeed that of her mother's first husband.

Lutzky was killed Sept. 21, 1944, in "Estland,"or Russia, and was buried in Abja-Paluoja in present-day Estonia.

This information corresponds with the German-Russian front moving west from Leningrad toward Berlin and dovetails with Davis's movements covering the war for the Toronto Star at the time.

It seemed like a miracle. Contacting Annelies was like getting a reply to a message in a bottle tossed into the Atlantic.

Within hours I had packed the soldbuch to send to her family.

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