“I believe that’s Candace Bishkoff. Her daughter, Lucy, had been killed in the fire. The story goes that she’s the one who led the townspeople to Hattie’s that afternoon.”

“Bishkoff? Are any of her relatives still around?”

“Why sure. There are plenty of them. They own the pig farm and smokehouse—Uncle Fred’s Smokehouse—you know it?”

She nodded. “I’ve driven by.”

Mary Ann carefully replaced the photo in its folder and rubbed her hands together excitedly. “Well! Enough of that! Let’s get started with that research! What exactly are you looking for?”

“I’m trying to trace Hattie’s family tree, to find any living descendants she may have.”

I’m trying to save one of them.

Helen continued. “I know she had a daughter, Jane…”

“No one knows what happened to Jane,” Mary Ann said sadly, shaking her head. “She disappeared soon after the hanging and was never heard from again.”

“Actually, I’m fairly certain she went up to Lewisburg and eventually married a man named Silas Whitcomb. They had two children, Ann and Mark. Jane was killed in a fire at the Donovan and Sons Mill when the children were young. Her daughter, Ann, later married a Samuel Gray—they lived over in Elsbury. Samuel and Ann had a son, Jason, and a daughter, Gloria. Samuel and Ann were killed…a murder-suicide, and the children went off to live with relatives.”

“My goodness,” Mary Ann said. “You certainly have learned a lot! You should come volunteer here. We could always use someone with good research skills!”

“I’d love to. Maybe once the house is finished and I have more free time—right now, I’m looking for any other family. And I’d like to know what happened to Jason and Gloria—who they went to live with, where they are now.”

Mary Ann was amazingly adept at using both the computer and microfiche reader. In fact, she was a much faster typist than Helen—her fingers flew across the keyboard.

Together, they looked through genealogy websites, public records, census data, and old newspapers. Helen’s eyes got bleary and she felt a little queasy from flipping through page after page of birth and death records in state newspapers on the microfiche reader. She read articles about the mill fire that killed Jane, about Ann’s murder.

The first thing they discovered was that after Jane’s death, Silas Whitcomb remarried and had four more children, giving Ann and Mark half siblings, each of whom then married and had children.

Through Mary Ann’s skillful navigation of public records, they learned that Mark Whitcomb moved to Keene, New Hampshire, and married a woman named Sara Sharpe in 1965. They had three daughters: Rebecca, Stacy, and Marie. Mary Ann pulled up copies of birth certificates for all three.