Central Pennsylvania Author Nancy Bieber will share her adventure of finding letters hidden in her attic that told about her grandmother Fianna Bucher Meyer—whom Bieber never met—and what resulted from the discovery.
Bieber’s presentation “Lessons in Living and Dying: Discovering Fianna” will be offered on Wednesday, May 3 at 7pm in the Garden Spot Village Chapel. Grandmother Fianna lived over a century ago and died at age 28 of the incurable disease of tuberculosis, leaving behind a grieving husband and two small children. Bieber will recount her story, including the tale of love and faith that sustained her family during her illness and months at a tuberculosis sanatorium.
Feeling a responsibility to be a “good steward” of this rare collection of letters she’d found, Bieber wrote Fianna’s Story: A True Story of Love, Grief and Faith. The book includes tales of Fianna’s farming childhood in Lancaster and Lebanon Counties, her student days at Elizabethtown College, and her few years of marriage and motherhood, as well as life at the tuberculosis sanatorium and the strange treatments received there for this dreaded and incurable disease.
“I needed to share her story,” Bieber said. It is, she said, “a deeply human story that brings both grief and gladness to readers. My ancestors poured their lives out in their letters. And they were saved through the years until they came to me.”
Bieber has recently offered the papers to Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies where they will be archived.
