I was told by Aunt Jenny that you wanted to find us. Well, you found me. Let’s start there ...

KANNAPOLIS — But the story didn’t start there.

Linda Guessford doesn’t know where the story started.

Or when.

Certainly long before she got that letter last week from a sister she never knew she had.

But she knows how she felt when she got a telephone call from a bank in Hagerstown, Md., about a year ago, not long after her mother died. And she knows how she felt when she called her Aunt Jenny.

“My mother died on April 5, 1999,” she says. “She went to her grave with secrets.”

But she didn’t know that, either, until she got a call from Vickie Kelly of Hagerstown Trust Bank in Hagerstown, Md.

“She called to ask me if Iknew who Ross Lynn was.”

An insurance policy was taken out in 1949, a joint insurance policy with the names of Ross Edgar Lynn and Violet Mae Lynn on it.

But Linda didn’t know a Ross Lynn, and her mother’s name was Violet Mae, but not Violet Mae Lynn. She was Violet Mae Laird. Leroy Laird, the man that Linda, who’s now 52, and her brother, Larry, have believed was their father all their lives — or what they’ve always thought was all their lives — died of a heart attack less than two months before their mother died of cancer.

She didn’t know what the woman at the bank was talking about or what to think.

“So I called my Aunt Jenny in Pennsylvania. And she said, ‘Linda, are you sitting down?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she told me that my mother had been married before, to a man 20 years older than her, and I had a brother and two sisters.”

She says it — and she’s then silent.

She still can’t take it in.

“You can imagine how I felt. I don’t know how to describe it. She told me I had a sister named Lila and another sister named Jean and a brother named Richard, and another sister named Anna, but Anna died when she was 6 weeks old.”

She’s out of breath.

“I thought Leroy Laird was my father,” she says. “I was in shock. I about went through the chair,” she says. “She told me my mother was 18 when she married Ross Lynn. When she was 19, she had Lila. She had six children.”

But her mother left her husband, taking with her and Leroy her two youngest children, Linda, who was not quite 3, and her baby brother, Larry.

Now Linda’s words are gushing out, leapfrogging each other. She’s got four children herself. And grandchildren. And suddenly she finds out she has sisters and a brother she never knew about, and maybe her father wasn’t her father at all, no matter how long she’d thought he was or how much she loved him.

“I thought the world of him. He was good to me. He called me his little princess.”

Now the family is wondering if he and her mother were ever married, even if they did live together almost 50 years.

“We don’t know,” Linda says.

Nobody has found a marriage license or can remember that they ever celebrated an anniversary. That night, she couldn’t sleep — nor the next night nor the next.

“I’d be staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning. Then I got depressed, wondering which way to turn, wondering why didn’t my mother tell me. I was right there holding her hand when she died. She was 83. She’d had cancer for two years, but didn’t get very bad until the last six months. After Dad passed away, she really went down hill.

“It’s a wonder I’m still living,” she says, “worrying over all this.”

Her fiance, Patrick Teal, tried to help, looking for her sisters and brother on the Internet but kept running into dead ends.

“And then two weeks ago, he got into this family Web,” Linda says, “and he was skimming down the line and he came across ‘Lynn Siblings, Altoona, Pa.’ ”

Pat immediately e-mailed a woman named Cindy Packett and asked if they were related to a Ross Lynn.

“She wrote back and said yes,” Linda says, “and that was the start right there.”

Linda’s mother, she wrote, was Ross Lynn’s second wife. He had a daughter, Harriet, by a first marriage, so Linda and Harriet are half sisters. Cindy is Harriet’s daughter, therefore, Linda’s niece, and Cindy has children and grandchildren.

So the next weekend, Linda and Pat drove to Waldorf, Md., to meet Cindy and her family. Harriet couldn’t be there, but Linda got a picture of her.

“And she looks exactly like me! We had a great weekend. I got to meet grandnieces and a great-grandniece, only 3 months old, and we came back happy. Cindy kept e-mailing us every night.”

A month earlier, she had written to Aunt Jenny and told her she just needed to find those sisters and brother, so Aunt Jenny located Lila. A few days after they got back from Maryland, Linda got an Easter card, a picture and a letter from Lila, the letter that said, “you found me. Let’s start there.”

And she plunged in.

“I’ve been praying that God would keep you safe and sound,” Lila wrote, “that no harm would come to you, that we would meet someday. I haven’t seen you for 50 years. Mom left home with Lee and you and Larry on March 15, 1951.

“She said to say goodbye to Linda and Larry because I’m going to see to it that you and Jean never see them again,” apparently afraid they’d tell things she didn’t want told.

What those things were, Lila didn’t say, but she made it clear she’d never forgotten her little sister.

In January, she wrote, she stood in a neighbor’s yard and prayed. Linda should know the story, she told God. If he thought she should know, he had to help find her.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she told him. “She lives in North Carolina. ... It’s up to you and I will wait for an answer. If I don’t hear nothing, then Iknow. But if I do, I will promise you Iwill tell her some of it, and Jean will tell the other.”

Then she said “Amen” and walked in the house — and two weeks later Aunt Jenny got in touch with her.

“My prayers were answered,” she wrote Linda, and then turned to family news. She wrote about their father’s death, said she hasn’t seen their brother since then, told her about her husband’s death and their children, and about her job.

Then she reached into memory.

“I used to diaper you and Larry,” she wrote.

Reading the letter, Linda chokes up.

“It’s the hardest letter I ever read,” she says.

And the best.

She has no memory of any of that or any of those others who are her closest kin but now she knows they exist. And she plans to get to know them.

“I called her up,” Linda says, “and talked to her for two hours.” And then she talked to the other sister, Jean, who lives in Buffalo, N.Y.

“And we’re hoping to get together. We just don’t know when. Lila works and Jean works, but it’s going to happen.

“Cindy and Harriet are looking forward to it, too. I said let’s forget the halves and be one big family, and Cindy said, ‘Honey, we are one big family.’

“Harriet has some pictures of my father, and she’s trying to get everything together and wants to send them to me. I’ve got a whole life to find out about.”

And her children are interested, too. One son, Michael, hopes they can have a big family reunion during the summer.

And while she thinks and plans and hopes for that, she has a message for mothers, she says, that comes from the bottom of her heart.

“There are mothers out there now who are keeping secrets from their children,” she says. “Wait until they’re of age and then sit down and talk to them. Don’t let them go through what I’m going through. If you can’t tell them, write a letter to each one, explaining.

“You need to know who you are. If you don’t know who your parents were, you don’t know what kind of diseases your family had, what kind of personalities, how long they lived.”