We've been transatlantic pen pals for 70 years and are now more like sisters
It was just wonderful, especially once I met her."Shirley, a former nurse, recalled being given Kathleen's address in 1956."My Brownie leader came in with a cigar box full of names and asked if anyone would like a pen pal from Scotland," she said. "I grabbed a name and it was Kathleen Bonthron. "We just wrote a few times a year at first but then we started writing more and it just got to be fun."I got to learn about her culture and she learned about ours.
- ▪It was just wonderful, especially once I met her."Shirley, a former nurse, recalled being given Kathleen's address in 1956."My Brownie leader came in with a cigar box full of names and asked if anyone would like a pen pal from Scotland," sh
- ▪"I grabbed a name and it was Kathleen Bonthron.
- ▪"We just wrote a few times a year at first but then we started writing more and it just got to be fun."I got to learn about her culture and she learned about ours.
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| Original publisher | BBC News — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jrxq7vej3qo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:24:01 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T11:08:46.105Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T11:08:46.105Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | FrvRc60923Kv · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
We've been transatlantic pen pals for 70 years and are now more like sistersImage source, Kathleen WilsonImage caption, Kathleen (left) and Shirley have built a strong friendship over the past 70 yearsByCatherine LystBBC ScotlandPublished18 September 2026Updated 2 hours agoTwo women who became transatlantic pen pals when they were in the Brownies say they now feel "more like family", having written to each other regularly for 70 years.Kathleen Bonthron (now Wilson) from Drumchapel in Glasgow was 10 when her group leader gave her the Wisconsin address for 11-year-old Shirley Hedtke (now Yaeger) in 1956.
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