“It started the most incredible landslide of communication between many people all who agreed that we needed to find the potential heirs of whatever money might be available in those accounts and return it to the family,” she said. One passbook was a joint account between Arthur and Eleanor Webster who were the original owners of the home, built in 1912. “The other was just Eleanor’s account which was very unusual at that time for a woman to have her own bank account,” Mrs Jeffery said. And the third was owned by a woman called Muriel White, Mrs Jeffery said. “We started researching who they were, I went to the Toowong cemetery to visit the gravestone of the couple and found they had had two sons,” she said.

One child died shortly after birth and the other son married but didn’t have any children, Mrs Jeffery said. Caylie Jeffery share a photo on Facebook and sparked a communication landslide. Credit:Facebook Mrs Webster died suddenly in 1958 and her husband, a train driver, died in the 1970s, so the family essentially died out altogether in 1989, but they did have extended family, Mrs Jeffery said. “We have been contacted by a couple of the relatives, long-lost cousins and great aunts and so on, who have been following the story from the beginning and who have been very kind and generous with their stories," she said. After realising the amount of interest people had in following the story, the Queensland Writers' Centre facilitator set up a Facebook group for people to share their thoughts and help trawl through old records.

It was while searching through the Webster family history that Mrs Jeffery and her 900-strong Facebook community discovered Mrs Webster had a cousin called Muriel Murphy who married and died under the name Muriel Hill. “This has started up the big discussion of, could Eleanor Webster have had a fraudulent account?” Ms Jefferys said. “Did Eleanor open a bank account under her cousin's name and change the last name to White and why would she have done that?” “We are nearly at a point now where we believe that Eleanor had opened a fraudulent account to put excess money because she and her husband had retired and any extra money she was making from war bonds we think she was putting into this account.” War bonds were sold to people by the government to help fund the war and Mrs Jeffery thinks Mrs Webster sold these bonds to make a little money on the side.

“We think she was squirreling her money away from the government. She had to keep her pension so you weren’t allowed to have more than a certain amount of money, which was about 500 pounds in your bank account, otherwise they would reduce your pension,” she said. “So every excess money she made doing whatever she was doing was potentially being put into this third bank account which we think she might have set up in her cousin’s name. “Lots of women used to do it in the day, to have their own cash stash in case they needed to get out of a relationship or keeping money for a rainy day and unfortunately dying before getting to use it.” Notes were also found hidden under the floor of Mrs Jeffery said. Credit:Facebook/Caylie Jeffery Mrs Jeffery said was contacted by a woman whose father had worked alongside Arthur at Queensland Rail who had described him as a “bullish” man and she began to wonder whether this story could be the makings of a creative non-fiction piece about their lives.

“I would like to know what her relationship with her husband was like, what life was like living with a FIFO worker and how difficult was it for her to lose a child at birth...and to bring up a child essentially on her own in the days of the war,” she said. “I have a lot of questions for Eleanor.” Mrs Jeffery said she was overwhelmed by how many people are fascinated by her story and said it had kick-started many others to delve into their own family histories. “Truth is better than fiction here ... by starting this group we actually opened up a lot of pathways for people who didn't know Trove, didn’t know how to start researching and so people went off on their own little journeys and discovered that by introducing a little bit of mystery, that is what makes history so interesting,” she said. “I think it is because Netflix is just not enough.”

A Pozible campaign has been set up to cover the costs involved in researching and publishing an historical narrative book by Mrs Jeffery.