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through thousands of pages of documents in an effort to track down the descendants of those who had written to B. Virdot. I wanted to know what had become of them. Did they survive? Did they go on to prosper? Did they become part of some permanent underclass? Did they know about the B. Virdot gift, and if so, did it make a difference in their lives?
    I began my research by reading all the letters, then focused on about fifty that seemed representative of the rest. Over time, I developed a methodology that served me well in locating the descendants of those who wrote to B. Virdot. I began with the Canton city directory from 1933 that alphabetically listed the residents, their trade, employer, spouse, and sometimes their children. From there I searched by name in the U.S. Censuses for 1910, 1920, and 1930. This provided me such vital information as age, family members, place of birth, national origin, date of naturalization, native language, and level of literacy. It also gave me a snapshot of the immediate community, listing the same information about their neighbors. I combed through World War I draft registration forms and land records. In Canton’s probate court, I searched wills, death records, and marriage licenses. The latter allowed me to trace the lives of daughters who later took their husbands’ last names.
    Death records provided me not only the cause of death and place of burial but the names of the attending physician and the parents of the letter writers. Parents’ names allowed me to track family histories going back in time. Taking the date of death from the death certificate, I could find the person’s obituary in the newspaper, and that gave me a condensed life story of the deceased, and, even more important, the names of surviving family members, which allowed me to come forward in time to the present. I also pored over ships’ passenger lists and naturalization records and microfilmed copies of the Canton Repository . I was given access to the county’s orphanage records and the state’s prison records.
    There my work ended—with regard to documents—and began with regard to people. Using various online search sites and telephone directories I tracked down the survivors. Over the course of the next sixteen months, I interviewed about five hundred descendants, many of them multiple times. To my surprise, seventy-five years after B. Virdot made his offer, nearly all the descendants still called Canton “home.” Many lived within five miles of where their parents or grandparents had written their letters during the Great Depression.
    I read them the letters. Many wept. They provided me with personal stories and family albums, and helped me trace lives across the generations. They shared with me what wisdom, if any, had been handed down from that awful time. I walked the streets and alleyways of my hometown seeing them with new eyes, guided by the voices of the letters. My years as an investigative reporter prepared me well for such a quest.
    But I was not prepared for what I was to learn about my grandfather, the man they knew as “B. Virdot.” The same suitcase that contained the letters held tantalizing leads to the identity of Sam Stone, a man whose background was as mysterious to his own family as it was to the recipients of his largesse. For his children and grandchildren, the revelations related to B. Virdot were just the beginning. The same repositories of public records that helped me track down the descendants of those who wrote to Mr. B. Virdot also yielded clues about my grandfather’s past. It took months to clear away decades of fabrication and deception—even today, given my feelings for the man, it is hard for me to utter the word lies —before I could begin to understand what drove him to make such a gift.
    For a year I imagined myself on two parallel pursuits—the one to track down the identities of those who wrote to B. Virdot, the other to discover the true identity and