Maggie Malone traced her identity through pages and pages of letters she keeps in her apartment.

"This is from France on Christmas Eve, 1944," Malone said as she pulled one of the letters from the pile.

"'This indeed is a day I wish I were with you,'" she read from it.

The words were written by Malone's father as he fought in World War II.

Richard Malone was drafted not even a year earlier.

And just three months after the letter, he would be dead, killed by artillery near the Rhine, leaving Malone, her two sisters and her mother in a small South Dakota town.

"It was a very hard time," Malone recalled.

Maggie Malone was just three at the time, not old enough to remember much about her dad. And no one in the house wanted to talk about him. It was just too painful.

But when Malone was nine, she discovered nearly 200 letters her father had sent home during the war, stashed in a trunk.

"I found those letters and it really made a big difference in my life," Malone said.

Malone has carried the letters, now copies of them, for nearly all of her life as she tries to piece together his identity as well as her own.

"How do I connect the dots," Malone asked. "How do I figure out how I ended up here?"

She is now putting her story - and her father's - on paper at a memoir-writing class for senior citizens at the JCC on the Upper West Side.

"I get to tell my stories," Malone said. "And that's really been a dream for a long, long time."

It's taught by poet Janet Kirchheimer, a child of Holocaust survivors who has put her own story on paper.

"I always had these stories, I always knew them," Kirchheimer said of her writing process. "It was just how do I get them out, and poetry was the way."

Through writing prompts, she helps her students, many in their seventies and eighties tell their life stories.

"It is really bringing to the fore something that you may have pushed down, know that you want to write about but said, 'I just can't,'" said Kirchheimer.  

In less than a year, Maggie Malone has filled an entire book, most of it with stories about her father and how, through his letters, he guided her life as she went off to college and moved to the city more than a half century ago.

"He's been my spirit guide all these years because he really loved the adventure," Malone said, recalling how her father once wrote the family during basic training to tell them how excited he was to see the Pacific Ocean.

(Maggie Malone, sitting in her Manhattan apartment.)

Malone, who never married or had children, says she doesn't plan to publish her stories. Instead, she wants to put them together for her nieces and nephews.

"I think it's really important to know that you come from decades and centuries of people, Malone said. “You've got their blood and DNA. And it makes you stand up straighter. It makes you more of a person if you realize who has got your back."

That’s why she’s woven together her father's story: so she and her family can figure out their own.