Last month I was able to provide a hands-on mini-lesson in critical thinking and research skills to two groups of students. But I couldn’t have done it if it weren’t for a youngster who has only recently outgrown his Cub Scout uniform!

I retired from 40 years of teaching U.S. history at Fitch and Cutler middle schools in June 2014. My teaching was not limited to the text. I also used a lot of supplemental primary source materials, especially correspondence from the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries that I had purchased at stamp shows.

In September 2014 I got a phone call from a former social studies teacher from Fitch, Monson Lane, who was then principal of S.B. Butler Elementary School in Mystic. Monson wanted me to come in one day a week for a history enrichment program for fifth grade students. I readily agreed and have continued ever since.

I was also asked to return to Cutler as a volunteer to keep the stamp club going, an activity I had started at Fitch and brought with me to Cutler. In the club many kids put together stamp collections, while others are fascinated by the antique correspondence. Some do both.

One youngster who is interested in both stamp collecting and postal history is Noah. Last year, when he was in the fifth grade, he chose as his project two letters mailed from Middletown, one written in 1826 and the other a year later, by B.G. Noble to his father Sylvanus of Brookfield. Noah began transcribing the first letter, and we did a computer search, finding out that the author was Birdsey Glover Noble, an Episcopal clergyman who was the rector of Christ Church, Middletown (now the Church of the Holy Trinity), beginning his tenure in 1813 and moving on in 1828.

Two weeks ago, I began to look closely at a letter that I purchased some time ago. The letter is addressed to Mrs. Elizabeth Coolidge, care of Joseph Coolidge, of Boston, Massachusetts, from her daughter, also named Elizabeth, writing from Middletown. The dealer had marked on the protective sleeve the date of 1845. I didn’t question that date (which, frankly, I couldn’t see well enough) until I began to read the letter.

Young Elizabeth wrote her mother on May 12 and told her she’d gone to church that morning and heard Mr. Noble preach. Had I not been familiar with Noah’s research, that wouldn’t have meant much to me, but it got me wondering about the year of the letter, since I recalled that Mr. Noble wasn’t in Middletown in 1845. When I showed the letter to the students in both schools, I asked them on what day of the week they thought it had been written. They realized that since Elizabeth mentioned going to church, that it was a Sunday. After making sure that they all had clean hands, I had them look closely at the date. (Kids love to use a magnifying glass). Almost all of them saw the date as either 1815 or 1816. The trick then was to use a perpetual calendar, a wonderful tool for historians, to find the correct year.

May 12 was not a Sunday in 1845, but it was in 1816.

I further pointed out that young Elizabeth had used both forms of the letter “s” in her writing, a handwriting style that was on the decline by the mid-19th century. If the letter had been written in 1845, the author would likely have been an older person, not 19 years old as she was in 1816.

While there is nothing of any particular historical significance in any of the three letters, several kids were able to learn a little about the process of historical research, and they had a good time and clean hands!

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton public school teacher. To write your Remembrance of Things Past, email l.howard@theday.com.