Cereal box held hundreds of letters from WWII POWs

A Corn Flakes cereal box held one Tennessee family's artifacts from the Second World War for decades.

An estimated 400 letters were found in the box in the late 1980s by a descendant of one of the area's two prominent wartime families – the Striblings and the Brocks.

They were written by German prisoners of war who had been captured overseas and shipped off to a prison camp in Tennessee.

See photos of the letters:

During this time, they were sent to perform manual labor on the two families' farms, and though relations started out as somewhat adversarial, things became more friendly as they got to know each other.

When the Germans returned home, they wrote letters back to the people they had gotten to know, even addressing them as aunt and uncle.

In one of the examples that has since been translated, one soldier thanks the Brocks for the Christmas present of pants and shoes they had sent him.

Another reminisced about drinking buttermilk on the Stribling farm's porch.

The letters, which were dated from the mid 40s to the mid 70s, have been donated to Nashville's Lipscomb University and are currently being translated and digitized.