REMEMBER When’s Nova Scotia postcard mystery has been solved.

A while ago we told you about two postcards which turned up earlier this year in a Totnes charity shop.

The plain British-made cards, postmarked December 1970, were addressed to a Mrs Betty Eade in Penhill Drive. They had been sent by a Brenda or possibly Breada Young from a tiny community called Hubbards on the rugged Atlantic coast of the Canadian province.

Each had Canadian Christmas stamps and bore the message: “Glad to be able to help out by sending this postcard.”

We speculated that the answer to the conundrum involved stamp collecting, and it turned out to involve not one collector but an entire family of them.

Within days of the story appearing, we were contacted by Mrs Eade’s daughter, Sara, 61, a retired Shropshire County Youth Officer living in Tywyn on Cardigan Bay. Sara is also an author of non-fiction history books about slate quarrying in Wales, which are available through Amazon.

An old friend of the family in Swindon had seen our article and sent a copy to Sara’s brother, Richard, a 59-year-old retired senior manager at Nottingham Trent University.

Betty Eade, who died in 2002, was their mum. Their dad was Keith, a council architect and distinguished amateur railway artist who died in 1993.

Betty and Keith assembled a museum-quality collection of Swindon-related postal items, including many rare postmarks. Those items are now with the town’s museum.

“We were all stamp collectors,” Sara said. “Mum had hundreds of friends – literally hundreds. She wrote to people all over the world. She used to get her penfriends to send all sorts of things back to her.

“I remember when I was at college I used to draw maps of Penhill Drive on items instead of writing an address, and the postman would deliver them. We did all sorts of things like that just to test it out.”

And the postcards from Nova Scotia?

“Mum would have sent them over and asked a friend to send them back with Canadian stamps. It was the only way she could get used stamps.”

When their parents died, neither sibling disposed of any part of the collection, apart from the items donated to the museum, so Sara speculates that the cards found in the charity shop were ones her mother got rid of during her lifetime, perhaps after losing interest in Canadian material.

How they ended up in Devon, however, remains as big a mystery as ever.