Sharon was only seven years old when she promised to find her missing father, a P38 fighter pilot during WWII in the 428th, shot down over Germany a month before the war was over, on his last mission needed to transfer back to the states, only three weeks after she was born

There was no closure for the Estills after WW2. There was no information other than 'MIA' about whether 1st Lt. Shannon Estill was KIA or buried in a European cemetery. He had taken off with 10 other fighter pilots on April 13, 1945, to attack a railway station and destroy Nazi supply lines, when they ran into enemy anti-aircraft fire 

The letters the 22-year-old pilot had exchanged with his wife since they were high school sweethearts stopped coming. Sharon’s father was deemed unaccounted for and eventually listed as killed in action, despite his body not being recovered.

Now a 77-year-old author and retired professor, propelled by clues she pieced together from her parents’ wartime letters—along with help from military historians, eyewitnesses, and an excavation team—Taylor concluded a multi-decade mission to recover her father’s remains and bring him home in 2006. 

In the 1990s, with her own children grown, Taylor spent a summer transcribing the letters, getting to know her father through the resulting 3,000 typed pages, transcribed from the 450 handwritten correspondence letters  from her parents, spanning from their high school courtship to Estill’s pilot training to his deployment in the fall of 1944.

She found a reference to a possible crash site near the town of Elsnig in eastern Germany.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it had become possible for Taylor to visit the potential crash site, territory the Soviet Union had long controlled. She connected with German military aviation historian Hans-Guenther Ploes, who agreed to help her try to find and identify any aircraft and human remains.

In 2003 Ploes discovered the data plate from Estill’s downed plane, along with bone fragments nearby. The predecessor of the Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) sent a recovery team from the United States.

Now, through an immersive sound and light show premiering at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans this Veterans Day, she’s bringing her parents’ experience, and a larger story of war casualties and their families, to new generations.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/world-war-ii-love-letters-help-a-daughter-find-her-missing-father