Nancy Fisher, keeper of the newsroom files here at the Post, doesn’t open them to the public. Never.

Newsprint clippings, even in manila envelopes, age, become fragile. They could get lost, torn, stolen, destroyed by spilled coffee, etc., etc., etc. That’s why the Post gives a copy of its microfilm to the Rowan Public Library.

Occasionally — but very occasionally and only if she’s got time on her hands, which she never has — she’ll check a date for people from very far away, so they’ll have an easier time finding what they want in the library’s microfilm.

And Linda and Ron Etty qualify on that point. They’re from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

So that was in Nancy’s mind when she went to the files and opened the S drawer and found Duncan Stewart’s file and his letter.

Oh my! Oh my, oh my!

That letter was written 72 years ago, in April 1928. Nancy was speechless. It was in pencil — a seven-page closely-written letter on old-timey lined tablet paper, now brown with the years. How could she not show ...

She couldn’t, of course.

She had to show the letter, which wouldn’t be on microfilm anyway, and all its birthday stories about Duncan Stewart who was called “Dad” in Spencer, to Linda, his great-niece — and Linda caught her breath and echoed Nancy.

“Oh my! Oh my!” she said.

And she couldn’t have been happier if she’d found the end of the rainbow and its pot of gold on her front stoop, but she choked and teared up anyway.

Magic, it’s never-to-be-expected magic, and a never-to-be-forgotten moment.

“It was just like he was right here,” Nancy says. “They said, ‘Oh, look at his hands!’ and ‘Look, he’s got hair! He’s the only one of the brothers that’s got hair. Oh, he looks like my father. Look at all the stories about his birthdays. He must have been a beloved man.”

They looked and they read, and Linda marvelled that he walked from Salisbury to Spencer and that people called him Dad and ...

“Oh my,” she says, “my sister will just die for this.”

“When she opened that envelope,” Ron says, “it was like finding a hidden treasure. Especially the photograph and all the interest the town and newspaper had in Duncan.”

Oddly, Linda had familiar feeling about Salisbury because of stories handed down in the family. Duncan Stewart had immigrated to this country from Scotland and eventually settled in Spencer.

His brother, Andrew Miller Stewart, lost his wife while he was still in Scotland and decided to come to America, too, with his three children, Margaret, who was about 15, David, who was 12 and grew up to be Linda’s dad, and Robert, who was 6 or 7.

And when they got to this country in 1912, Duncan brought them to Spencer.

Linda still remembers the stories her dad and aunt told her about living in Spencer.

“I can remember my dad talking about a lynching. ... And he remembered eating possum.”

Her great-uncle was a machinist at the Spencer Shops, and maybe her grandfather hoped to work there, too, because their father had worked in a similar situation in Glasgow. But he didn’t stay. She doesn’t know why.

“They moved to Canada, where they settled. Granddad worked on boats, and that was railway related.

“Even the buildings look alike. When I saw the buildings here, it looked like exactly the same setup.”

But they didn’t expect to find a pot of gold, because they didn’t come south to do genealogical research.

They came to bring their daughter, who is a surf guard this summer at Myrtle Beach, and as long as they were that far south and in the car, why not detour slightly inland and see what they could find?

Ron led them into genealogy wanting to know about his family.

“I got back three or four generations,” he says, “and quit — it gets really hard — and Linda got the bug.” So he started again. Now he’s traced his family back to the 1600s in England.

“Every male was a tradesman — wheelwrights or stone carvers or carpenters, machinists, electricians. ... There wasn’t a dentist or a doctor in the whole bunch, 20 generations back. I wonder if it was a caste system.”

And Linda worked in a dental office, but after she got interested in her family, she quit her job and developed a part-time cleaning service, with plenty of time for research.

Now, Ron says, “we’ve got a whole room in our house piled high with records and computers,” and they’ve discovered searching for ancestors is a constant reminder of how much easier life is now than it used to be and a constant surprise.

“I find it fascinating,” he says. “Linda’s father and Duncan Stewart started to work young. They were on their own with a job when they were 14, and Duncan worked until he was 90. These days, people work till they’re 55 and say that’s enough.”

The search eventually took them to Scotland, but they learned little. Nothing they’ve ever uncovered has been the thrill they found here.

“We were deciding whether to drive here and inquire and perhaps feel foolish,” Ron says, “and we’re handed this gold mine of stuff. ”

“But that’s the way it works,” Linda says. And in a way, that makes the thrill greater.

All they knew about Duncan Stewart when they got here were his name, his wife’s name and the names of three children, Betsy, Bertha and Andrew.

Like they do everywhere, they went to the office of the register of deeds first, then to the library where someone suggested they come here, then they saw Nancy and now ....

Now they know there weren’t three children. There were eight.

“And we’ve found this old gentleman,” Ron says, “and it seems like he made the newspapers all the time. Every couple of years, they did a story on him — a story about Dad celebrating his birthday — and then the letter he contributed to the Post on his trip to Scotland in 1928. It’s just amazing the information we were able to find.”

Not that his envelope bulges, but what’s there is so much fun.

The first birthday that made the paper was his 84th — a year after he took that trip to Scotland and wrote about it. He was still in good health, the story said, in good health — and still working.

And then came his 88th, the 89th; and when he was 92, he told young reporter Ed Rankin about his life.

He sailed the high seas as a runaway, worked his way from Scotland to Japan to South America — and went home. His father welcomed him with a sound thrashing for running away.

So what did he do then?

He apprenticed himself on the Caledonia railroad as a machinist (not knowing Spencer was in his future), and as soon as he turned 20 ran away again. This time to America, where he “lived the life that every vigorous man or boy dreams of,” fell in love and married in Iowa. His wife’s health brought him South. In 1902 he got to Spencer and stayed.

On that trip in 1928 he was pushed overboard. He was pulled in with a broken nose, injured shoulder and leg — and was unconscious. But two days and nights later he was he was well enough to get off when the ship docked.

But the business outlook in Scotland was bad — and the crash of ’29 made that overboard trip his last.

In 1939, the Knights of Pythias, to which he’d belonged for more than 50 years, honored him with a life membership.

Always active, always interested, a good companion and a good conversationalist, the Post said, when he died at 97.

A gold mine, Ron called all the unexpected things they found on their unplanned side trip to Rowan County, wonderful, interesting nuggets to go with pictures — and memories they can’t believe.

So they don’t want to leave.

They want to spend a week here. They want to go back to the library. They want to follow up on new names they’ve found. They want to talk to more people.

Linda marvels at the pull of family history and what they’ve learned because someone at the Post filed a letter in 1928 that took Nancy Fisher’s breath away in 2000 and made her share the file.