Duane Mann was engaged to get married to a Japanese lady he met while serving in Japan with the Air Force during the Korean War. However, when the war suddenly ended he was quickly sent home and for various reasons lost contact with his fiancé. Now after all these years they have been reunited through the power of the Internet:
In a last-ditch effort to find her, Mann posted a plea on Facebook on May 1, sharing a photo he’d taken of her along with the whole story, writing that he carried “a very heavy heart because of what all happened.”
Friends, strangers and internet sleuths weighed in with suggestions. A local news channel, KETV7, picked up the story, spreading Mann’s plea even further.
That’s when a young woman in Vancouver caught wind of Mann’s plight.
“I couldn’t get it off my mind,” said Theresa Wong, 23, who works at the History Channel. “Duane has clearly been looking for closure for seven decades. I can’t imagine how that must weigh on a person.”
She decided to join the search, and soon, “I had her name, the names of her relatives. It all came together very quickly,” she said.
Wong typed in “Peggy Yamaguchi” on newspapers.com, hoping to find a marriage announcement of some sort. A promising article, with the headline “Tokyo Bride Likes Life in Escanaba,” appeared.
“It seemed to line up with everything,” Wong said.
She shared her findings with KETV7, and the station then had a married name and address in Michigan to go on. A reporter contacted Yamaguchi’s son, Rich Sedenquist.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link about how they were reunited, but it is pretty amazing that both of them are still alive in their 90’s to be able to reunite like this.
