Holiday meals are synonymous with family stories.  Mostly recycled ones.  Some holiday meals become family stories - I have at least one of those that involves exploding pipes.  Last winter, as my sisters and I gathered with the next generation of family, we shared a story that both fascinated and intrigued the thirty and twenty something year old's present.  It happened in the 1940's - way before my time but we can thank mom for keeping the story alive over the years.  That's where this story begins.

It's summer on the high plains.  Hot and sticky.   My sister and I were on our way to Sioux Falls with mom, a field trip of sorts.  We were probably twelve and sixteen respectively at the time and headed to the Argus Leader microfiche room.    Mom told us a story on the way in.

Farm families were close back in the day.  You knew a stranger from the rooster tail their car dust kicked up as it appeared a half mile down the gravel road.  When your dad and I were first married, we had a hired man who lived with us on the farm.  Not for long, just through the harvest.  Didn't know really much about him.  Well that man eventually married my cousin and they had a little girl.  The man wasn't right and he killed both his wife and himself back in the forties - leaving the girl without her parents.  Today, we're going to look up the newspapers from that time.   It was a very big story and I want you kids to read about it.  There is a girl, now a woman, who doesn't know her mom's family.   She was raised by her father's side and none of us know whatever happened to her.  Perhaps someday she'll return looking for answers and it will fall upon you to fill in the pieces.

Mom was not kidding when she said the story made the headlines.  Taking the reels of microfiche out of storage container after storage container, it took us about an hour to pin down the exact timeframe.  The case was worthy of a week's worth of front page stories.  First there was the disappearance.  Young mother didn't come in to work.  Next there was the investigation into the disappearance followed by news of finding the bodies in a car parked along a gravel road the next day just outside the city limits.  The conclusions were quickly drawn and the police were asked whether they had done everything they could in a case that started with domestic violence.  It was a different time then, the case was closed and the reporters moved on.  Yet there was a child.  For reasons that will forever be lost to time, the child was released to the paternal grandparent's care.  The maternal grandmother spent her life savings hiring lawyers and investigators to find and return the child but it was money spent that would never deliver any return.  She died in the 70's never seeing her grandchild grow from a toddler to a woman.

It's now 1993, some fifty years since the disappearance and nearly twenty since our field trip to the over heated newsroom.  It is spring, June to be precise, and two strangers entered town.  They had started their day in the same microfiche room at the Argus looking only to find a woman's obituary.  By the end of their reading they came to know the circumstances of her death and it pointed them to a small town fifteen miles to the north.

Starting with a phone call to the church the woman's family was associated with according to the news accounts they had read, the strangers asked the pastor if he knew of the family.  The name wasn't familar and generations had passed, he was moving his family that day to Michigan or he would take the strangers out to the township cemetary where the woman was buried.  Instead they made their way to down to Main Street. 

They stopped at the weekly newspaper office, it was noon and closed for the lunch hour.  So they walked down the block that made up the whole of downtown and stopped at the local cafe.  They hold the door for an elderly gentleman to pass through.  His walk was slow, his balance assisted by two canes. 

Making their way to the counter, they asked the woman behind the cashier's till if she had heard of the family name or knew where the township cemetary was located.  "No, but I'll bet the man who you held the door open for might know."   They came out of the storefront looked to the east and saw the old man just now approaching his car.  "Excuse us sir but we are looking for the resting place of a family member."  They relayed the details of what they had learned that morning and he said, "I know who you are.  While I am old and in no shape to take you there, there is a woman who lives close by to where you will find what you're after. Here's how you find her."

And on a June afternoon, with her dog Cindy by her side, mom opened the porch door cautiously to the strangers who had arrived bearing out-of-state license plates.  The woman in her early fifties said, "My name is Shirley".  Mom replied simply, "We've been looking for you".