Yesterday was a day of discovery and revelation. I have read dozens and dozens of pages of information from the genealogical research done by my sisters over eighteen years, and sometimes just one or two words give me clues to whole stories. Yesterday it was four items that helped me fill in some of Lillie's story.

1) Fact: She left Gus and lived with her relatives in Nebraska for several months in 1922-'23, and when she went back to Montana, she brought a kerosene stove filled with walnuts. Charley (now out of prison) took her to Kansas to gather the nuts.

2) Fact: In January, 1924, she and Gus mortgaged the homestead for $1400.

3) Fact: In 1930, someone filed a "materials lien" against either Lillie or Gus or both. Materials liens are mechanisms used by contractors or materials providers to cloud the title of real estate to be sure they get paid, and are nearly always for building construction.

4) Fact: In 1931, after Lillie's death, Gus had a mysterious fire that destroyed his house, indicating that it was a frame house, not the sod house they had originally built when they first arrived in Montana.

Conclusion: While she was in Nebraska, Lillie decided to go back to Gus, and that she was going to have a new house. The kerosene stove was for her new house. The sod house was probably collapsing, after ten years. The new house was undoubtedly built, but when Lillie left Gus again in 1928, this time for good, and split the land, he got to keep the house. She and my dad (age twenty-four) moved an abandoned shack onto her half of the land, and lived there for two years, until her mysterious death in November, 1930. Gus started missing payments on the $1400 loan shortly after her death. He collected the insurance on the house and left the area (back to horse trading) before the Federal Land Bank could foreclose and freeze the insurance payment.

I couldn't understand the issue of the walnuts. The nuts we are familiar with are English walnuts and are grown mostly in California. With the help of Google, I learned that BLACK walnuts are indigenous to eastern Kansas. Lillie loved them--so much that she traveled all that way to Kansas from Lincoln, Nebraska, in a horse and wagon (or maybe a Model T Ford) to gather bushels of them, and shipped them back to Montana inside the new stove.

Some of Gus's behavior sounds so contemporary. Hard to believe it was nearly eighty years ago. People are still pulling these stunts, only in millions instead of hundreds of dollars.

This is like being a police detective. Tons of fun!