Teacher finds poem from 1893 in a used book, tracks down the author's family

A corn husk, a 29-cent Elvis stamp, and a nail file are just some of the things Emma Smreker has discovered inside used books.

A high school French teacher in Oklahoma, Smreker has been collecting used books for some time, and she began noticing that the previous owners used interesting items to keep their place. "It's kind of fascinating," she told KFOR. "It sort of made me think of the story of a book, other than the one that's in the pages."

Smreker started an Instagram account to show off these bookmarks, and one immediately stood out, from inside a book of poetry she bought in December. It was a piece of paper, and handwritten in "beautiful cursive" was a poem, addressed to the Lancaster Gazette in Ohio, from 1893. It was written by a man named Ed Ruffner, and Smreker spent a day during her winter break searching for his relatives, going through census records and family trees.

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She soon found his great-granddaughter on Instagram and learned that Ruffner wrote lots of poetry, and the family still had some of his verses. The letter was passed along to the Lancaster Eagle Gazette, where it was published this month, 126 years after it was penned. "Their whole family is kind of spread out throughout the United States and they've been able to kind of reconnect over this letter," Smreker told News 4. "Honestly, it made me tear up a little bit when I heard about that."