Her husband may have been away at war of course.
Was your Aunt married at the time?
If I were you I would extract all the facts from the letters and get it all down on paper. Even the tiniest detail might lead to something:
Estmate years and places of birth
Any mentions of relatives names ages and places of birth and their relationship to Elaine
Addresses
It is up to you but if you wish to let us know all the details we might be able to help you by searching births, deaths and marriages, phone books etc.
I love all the personal details like shoe size.
I wonder if shoe sizing was different in 1945, as 9.5 sounds awfully big when women were smaller than they are today.
I did a bit of detective work inspired my father in laws war time diaries - I found the house where one of his lady friends lived (looked at it on google street view
), he'd mentioned a phone number and I found the same number (with the additon of several digits) right up to the 1960's. I also found out a huge amount of personal information about his favourite lady friend, her ancestry and traced her daughter, her work place and her address in America - scary to be able to find all this stuff so easily online.
Needless to say I did nothing with the information but I would love to have the nerve to contact this woman's daughter, but I feel a bit uncomfortably stalker like ...