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Yesterday, May 23, 2010, I attended a talk given by Professor Ernst Tonsing at the California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks California. Alex had alerted us to this talk (thanks Alex.) Professor Tonsing is a cousin of Amelia's but he was an infant when she disappeared. His great-grandmother was Amelia's grandmother, his grandmother was the sister of Amelia's mother. His talk was very interesting with many family stories and photographs. Also present was the daughter of Mr. Foudray, he had worked on the plane at Lockheed. Amelia was a friend of Mr. Foudray and Amelia had taken her flying on several occasions when she was about fifteen years old. Also present was a relative of Amelia's on her father's side.

Most of his talk was about family matters and he related a story that happened about 1951 when he was staying with his grandmother for the summer in Atchison. His grandmother and her sister, Amelia's mother, Amelia's sister, Muriel and cousin Lucy were having a discussion in the house. (You can see a picture of Lucy with Amelia on page 24 of Muriel's book.)

He went into the house and told the four women that he had just heard that someone had said that Amelia had been a spy. All four of the ladies emphatically said it wasn't true and that she was NOT a spy. Cousin Lucy said "Look, I've been a friend of Amelia's since childhood, we've been as close as ...I would know her better than anyone else. She was not a spy, that would have gone against everything that she stood for. She so strongly wanted to prove that a woman could fly around the world fast, she would not compromise that vision for anything." The other women agreed.

I have attached three video files of this portion of his talk and I have also uploaded these to the "Tonsing" folder in the files section. I recorded this in sections to keep the file size manageable and there is only about one second missing between each section. They were still too large to send, the second section was 80 megabytes, so I reduced the sizes of the files by reducing the video quality. I have also attached a photo of Professor Tonsing with the daughter of Mr. Foudray.

gl

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