While searching through boxes after her mother’s death, Nancy Hayes Kilgore came across handwritten letters from her grandmother to her grandfather.

As she read the words, she decided to type them into her computer. The more she documented the correspondence, an idea came to her about how the letters could live on.

“As I started transcribing them, I began to feel the connection between this couple back when people wrote letters,” said Kilgore, who was born in Sewickley, grew up in Leetsdale, and currently lives in Burlington, Vt. “Sadly, letter writing is a lost art. And I began to think, ‘Oh, this could be a book. This could be a novel.’”

During her writing process, similarities surfaced between the grandmother she never knew, Florence Rodkey, and her mother, Flossie Hayes.

“My grandmother’s personality was very lively and I thought, well, you know, this is a little bit like my mother’s personality,” Kilgore said. “I started thinking about what was underneath my mother’s wonderful, cheerful facade. That is how I started doing the parallel stories.”

Those stories are chronicled in the 216-page biographical fiction novel, “Pennsylvania Love Song,” which was published last month and tells the tales of Florence “Flossie” Craighead Hayes, who was 22 in 1941, and Florence Rodkey, who was 22 in 1911. It’s Kilgore’s fourth published book.

Kilgore said the fact that her grandfather, Ernest Craighead, saved a trove of letters showed his devotion to Florence. He would get teary-eyed when her name was mentioned, Kilgore recalled. Florence died at the age of 30 of ether pneumonia, a day after giving birth to Kilgore’s mother.

Kilgore recalls visiting the house of her grandfather. There was a photo of her grandmother.

“This old-fashioned young woman in the sepia photo wears a white lace dress, her head in profile, her features pale and delicate, her thick hair piled up in a pompadour,” Kilgore writes. “This ancient photo has always been here, on this wall, on this landing. The woman in the photo is refined, elusive. A mystery. Who is she, really? Is this my real grandmother?”

By the time Kilgore was a teenager, she knew her grandmother had died a day after her mother was born. The letters painted her as a beautiful, talented musician, Kilgore said.

The plot in the book begins when Flossie’s fiancé, Hammie Hamilton, is drafted and World War II begins. She is caught between loyalty to him and falling in love with a man named George Hayes, a young doctor, who asks for her hand in marriage. Flossie mourns the absence of being able to get advice from her mother, Florence.

Thirty years earlier, it was Florence who was in a love triangle. She was aspiring to be a concert pianist and was courted by Phillip Landers, who proposed to her. But she also had a best friend in Ernest Craighead, who has always been a true friend.

Both women struggle to combine an independent identity with love and marriage in a time of social upheaval — the suffragist movement and tuberculosis epidemic in the 1910s for Florence and World War II in the 1940s for Flossie.

The book has in-depth psychological and spiritual dimensions that play out in the ways Kilgore’s characters live their lives. Kilgore’s background includes a Doctor of Ministry in religion, culture and personality from Boston University, a certificate in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and a certificate in creative writing from Radcliffe College Writing Seminars, and a Master of Divinity from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She also has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and studied at Vassar College.

Kilgore attended Sewickley Academy until ninth grade (at that time, Sewickley Academy only went to ninth grade) and graduated from the Ellis School in Shadyside.

She credits Vassar and The Ellis School with her developing a strong writing foundation.

“I am thankful for a very good education,” Kilgore said.

In writing “Pennsylvania Love Song,” Kilgore talked to the Sewickley Herald about the grief her grandfather had when he named his daughter, Kilgore’s mother, the same name as her mother.

“What would it feel like to be named the same name as your mother, this perfect young woman?” Kilgore said. “That’s a lot to live up to. I would have mixed feelings about that, but I don’t know if my mother ever did.”

Kilgore said in her mother’s version, “Florence was a star, a vision of perfection, a woman of brilliance and beauty and grace, a musician who could charm the whole world. The unspoken wistfulness in my mother’s voice seems to say, I could never be like her.”

Lawrence Knorr, CEO and founder of the book’s publisher Sunbury Press, Inc., said via email that editors at Sunbury Press loved the historical duality of two generations of young women facing uncertainty during difficult times.

“Of course, the Western Pennsylvania settings were also a plus,” Knorr said. “As Mark Twain is accredited, ‘History does not repeat, but it often rhymes. Nancy is highly respected and well-reviewed. Personally, I think one of her strengths is her ability to craft believable dialogue that ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells.’ ”

Knorr said Kilgore is a gifted writer who is able to draw from her lived experiences and paint vivid scenes, interactions and settings with her words.

“One of the things that I love most about writing is creating a scene,” Kilgore said. “This is a good story. I know that is kind of cliché, but I think what people say is it takes you to different places. For instance, the middle of Pennsylvania in the early 1900s, where my grandmother grew up on a farm. And what it was like in Pittsburgh when World War II started. There is lots of history. People love history.”

Kilgore tried to preserve that history from the letters, which span a decade from Florence’s childhood home in Mahaffey, Pa., to her sister’s home in Chicago, to a ranch in New Mexico, and then to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Pennsylvania mountains.

“Reading those letters of my grandmother, I discerned she was very adventurous as a young woman and she wanted to explore the world and I could identify with that, even to the point of being a little reckless,” Kilgore said. “She was extremely flirtatious, and for that time, I guess a little bit too much. Both of them were strong women. They passed on some of those genes to me, and some of the recklessness too.”

Kilgore said she was surprised the letters were still legible because most were written in pencil.

“What I discover in the letters is both more and less than my image of the chestnut-haired muse who occupies that pedestal in my brain,” Kilgore said. “Not a saint or a star, but a very real young woman, Florence was vibrant, passionate, full of laughter and tears, sprightly, willful, arrogant, sarcastic, hopeful, and hopeless. And doomed by her weak lungs to die young.”

“Pennsylvania Love Song” is $19.95 and available on bookshop.com, Sunbury Press and Amazon.

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