"Your great-uncle Paul was a hail-fellow-well-met type, much more so than your grandfather." During my 1977 visit to my great-uncle, Oswald Braaten, in Kalispell, Montana, he speculated about his brother-in-law Paul's 1920 disappearance. "Butte was a wild place in the 1920s. After your grandpa left him there by himself, Paul probably met some people in a saloon, went off with them, and ended up in the bottom of a mine shaft."

Actually, at the time that conversation took place, my great-uncle Paul, age eighty, was still in Butte and definitely alive in a nursing home. Two years earlier, my parents had traveled from Minneapolis to Kalispell; they stopped in Butte on their return home to see if they could track Paul. Research in the city directories and newspapers of the 1920s revealed no trace of him. The obliging clerks of Butte and of Silver Bow County searched vainly for any listing of Paul, who was then living there with a nephew by marriage and his wife. Later, the county clerks wrote to my parents to say they could find nothing about Paul Moen. Paul had, so far as public records were concerned, vanished as thoroughly as the Wild West. My father did not discover Paul until 1995. By then Paul was buried, not in a mine shaft following a brawl, but next to his wife, Alice Shaughnessy Moen, at St. Mary's Cemetery in Missoula. He had died in 1978, seven years after Alice's death. Without my father's use of a CD-ROM database, even this belated finding would have been impossible.

By 1995, Paul had been missing to his family, including Ingeborg, his widowed mother, my great-grandmother, and Ole, his brother, my paternal grandfather, for seventy-five years. My father, Paul's nephew, had been searching for him for twenty-five years.

Paul Pederson Moen was born on 15 July 1897 in Ringebu, Oppland, Norway. He emigrated from Norway to the United States with his parents, Peder and Ingeborg, his brother Ole, and his sisters Anna, Elise, and Mari in 1903. They joined other family members in Scandinavia, Wisconsin. In about 1914, Ole moved to Minneapolis, and Paul and their parents followed him there the next year. In 1917, the father, Peder, died; in 1918, Ole married and left the family home, leaving Paul alone with their mother until his 1920 disappearance.

Before 1970, my father had little interest in genealogy in general and less interest in finding Paul in particular. He understood that Paul had run away from Minneapolis and had never been seen or heard of again, and gave it no more thought. My brother and I grew up knowing that we had a missing great-uncle-something worth nothing, but not as fascinating as the ancestor on my mother's side who had been hung in effigy before the Civil War. At one point, my mother suggested to my father that "it might be interesting to find out what happened to your great-uncle." To which Dad replied, "If Paul's still alive, he obviously doesn't want to be found."

All that changed in the 1970s when Dad took up genealogy. The passing of years had made him more conscious of family history, and the pastime proved a relief from the pressures of his job as an airline executive. Hints about Paul's existence as fleeting and unsubstantial as ghost riders in the sky had drifted his way on occasion. In the 1960s, someone had told him about a Paul Moen who worked at the Portland, Oregon, airport and resembled him. Then, a 1974 family reunion in Minneapolis finally lit my father's ambition to find Paul. The above-mentioned Oswald, my father's maternal uncle, on that occasion told how Paul had journeyed to Butte in 1920 and then vanished into the mountain air.

According to Oswald, his two brothers-in-law, Paul and Ole Moen, went to Butte in December 1920 to open a radiator shop. It seemed a sensible venture because of the continental-divide climate there and because Paul had worked in the radiator industry in Minneapolis. The plan was for Ole to assist Paul in getting started; Ole would then return to Minneapolis. My grandmother and their firstborn child, Blanche, stayed with her relatives (including Oswald) in North Dakota in the interim. After Ole returned to Minneapolis, he heard nothing more from Paul. In 1921, he went to Butte to search for him, finding not even a shadow. Anna, their sister, contacted the sheriff in Butte, with no results. Paul's mother lived another seventeen years, until 1938, with no further word from her son.

My father asked his mother to confirm her brother Oswald's story about Paul's and Ole's trip to Butte. Until that time, he had thought that Paul had departed from Minneapolis for parts unknown. My grandmother corroborated Oswald's account, with reluctance. We never found out why she was uncomfortable with the episode.

In twenty-five years of genealogical research, my father has compiled nearly eighty books' worth of family information. He has traced his ancestors in Norway back to 1584. But, until 1995, Paul's fate was an insurmountable hurdle. Paul's last sibling, Ida Moen Pederson, died in 1962 at age eighty-two. After talking to Oswald and my grandmother, contacting a few cousins, doing research in Butte, and writing to every imaginable local official there, Dad reached the end of a cold trail.

But the computer age rescued him. Dad began working on computers in 1991, and seized upon Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software as the means to further his genealogical research.

Then, in 1995, he upgraded his computer with a modem and a CD-ROM drive. The modem facilitated communication between St. Paul, Minnesota, where I live, and Seattle, where my parents retired in 1986. The CD-ROM drive expanded Dad's genealogical capabilities. He ordered a CD-ROM database from Family Tree Maker that showed all deceased Social Security recipients as of 1993. That register contains approximately 100 million names. Among those millions were nine people named Paul Moen. One showed a birth date of 15 July 1897 and a final Social Security payment on 1 February 1978 in Butte.

"The clues were too tantalizing to pass up," my father wrote to his team of family researchers. "I sent a request to the state of Montana for the death certificate of Paul Moen who had died in Butte, probably in February, 1978. A reply took several agonizing weeks but when it came, there was no doubt I had found the right person. The birth date, birthplace, and parents' names were all correct for Paul," he reported with the joy of a prospector striking gold.

The death certificate listed a George Shaughnessy as the informant. My Dad called him, and discovered that Paul had been married to George's aunt. He recalls that "the conversation was startling to both ends because Paul, according to George, had always brushed off any questions about whether he had brothers and sisters, and I had finally gotten results from my efforts after twenty-five years."

"You sound like Paul," George, as forthcoming as Paul was reticent, told my Dad. Though in his 80s and in poor health, George provided much information, sending photos of Paul and Alice, marriage and funeral information. Alice's certificate of baptism, and other family data. He mentioned that Paul served briefly in the armed forces during World War I, which gave him some supplemental income in his last yeas. St. Mary's Cemetery Association also sent the details of where they are buried.

Here is what we have pieced together so far about Paul's life from 1950, when he and Alice Shaughnessy Ostberg wed in a civil ceremony in Roundup, Montana, on March 1. He was then fifty-two, and she was fifty-one. This was apparently Paul's second marriage, as the certificate lists him as divorced. It was Alice's third marriage, as she was divorced from her first husband and then widowed by her second. A curious point is that the copy of her baptismal certificate from St. Francis Xavier, Missoula, is dated 15 July 1959. The issuance of the baptismal certificate in 1959 might indicate an effort to have the civil marriage blessed by the Catholic Church, particularly given Paul's and Alice's burials in a Catholic cemetery. They did not arrange for funeral plots until 1970, so the issuance of the baptismal certificate appears to be related to some event prior to that. Without knowing more details, however, this is only a guess.

In their twenty-one years together, according to Alice's nephew George, Paul and Alice led a nomadic lifestyle. Anyone attempting to catch up with Paul in the 1950s and 1960s would have seen nothing but clouds of dust. After moving several times within Montana, they departed for many out-of-state destinations, including Seattle, Yakima, Washington, and finally, Portland, where Alice died from cancer on 26 March 1971. Paul then returned to Butte.

Interestingly, Paul and Alice moved to Seattle in 1952, the same year my parents and I moved there from Minneapolis. Paul operated a service station in Seattle, and Alice, a milliner, managed an adjoining store; for all we know, we might have unwittingly driven up to their station for gas. My father has determined about half a dozen times when we could have crossed each other's paths.

The most important intersection was, of course, in Butte, 1975, when my parents falsely concluded that Paul was either dead or too far removed ever to be found. We'll never know why the clerks found no record of him. Paul apparently kept himself as "unlisted" as possible throughout his life.

We do know that after his return to Butte, Paul visited frequently with George and Evelyn Shaughnessy. He then moved to a facility in Hamilton, Montana, which furnished his lunch and dinner. Breakfast, however, had to be taken elsewhere, and one dark morning on his way to his meal, Paul fell and broke his hip. He stayed with the Shaughnessys during his recovery, but his health worsened. Paul had to go to the Park Royal Nursing Home in Butte, and then to St. James Community Hospital, where he died on 27 February 1978 of cardiac arrest. Pastor Robert Rodin officiated at funeral home services for him on March 1.

George sent my father a copy of an envelope addressed to Paul in Portland from St. Mary's Cemetery. On that sheet, George noted that "Aunt Alice Moen suffered with cancer for years in hospitals and rest homes in Portland. Paul was so caring to our Aunt Alice."

Based on that, Paul doesn't sound like the sort who would deliberately let his family suffer the anguish of not knowing where he was, or even whether he was alive. By now, no one knowing his true story would still be alive. We can conclude that Paul was unhappy in his Minneapolis home. Any number of family tensions might have been involved. My father stresses that when Ole, his father, left home in 1918 to marry, Paul was left alone with their Norwegian-speaking mother. She was approaching seventy when Paul departed for Butte in 1920. Living with an aging, unwell parent might have put a strain on the sociable Paul, leading him to move and vanish. Also, family money had to be involved in his setting up a business in Butte.

Mishandling of funds or related misunderstandings could also have been behind his disappearance.

Although Paul was fun-loving, I think he also had a proud, sensitive side, which made it difficult for him to forgive failings in himself or in others. Once he set out to separate himself from his family, he found it difficult to retrace his steps.

We'll probably never know exactly what took place in Butte in 1920, but we can now find out more about Paul's years after that. It should be easy to learn more about the years 1950 to 1978 by researching city directories in Seattle, Yakima, and Portland. It will be more difficult to investigate the years 1920 to 1950, about which we know little other than that a marriage presumably took place.

We may yet discover something that overshadows Oswald's original theory about the death in the mine shaft.