Finding Answers to Old Family Mysteries

"Growing up, Lisa Smith shared a room with her grandmother Maurine Chaney Everette in the family’s home in California. Her grandmother, Smith said, was like a mother to her. She was there to cook and bandage scraped knees. But there were things she rarely talked about — her scar, details of her childhood spent in an orphanage in Oklahoma. When Maurine died in 1992, she took much of her past with her."

All Lisa knew of her grandmother's past was that Maurine grew up in an orphanage in Oklahoma, she'd been involved in a train accident, and she had a brother. Searching online quickly provided Lisa with clues and then to connections with new-found cousins.

From there she was able to find a newspaper story of the 1918 train accident in which Maurine's father, mother and baby sister were killed. Read the full story In search for lost relatives, Nebraska woman uncovers truth about long-ago tragedy in the Omaha World Herald