Leafing through the recipes was like spending a year at this woman's dinner table. The box was so personal and revealing that Barbara wondered why anyone would have deliberately thrown it away. She was puzzled, but at the time she had more pressing things on her mind — like her wedding.

Barbara and Rob were soon married, and as they moved around the country — Wisconsin, Texas, back to Illinois, then Wisconsin again — the recipe box went with them.

Over the years, Barbara dug into the box from time to time. She once baked a butterscotch pie from it because the dessert was one of her mother's favorites. While living in Texas, she and some other wives sat around one afternoon comparing old recipes and laughing over the archaic instructions. Barbara found measurements like "a walnut of butter" and "a fist of lard." Another recipe instructed the cook to "place the cake in the icebox." And the back of one newspaper clipping advertised a special on Nestlé Chocolate Morsels: two six-ounce packages for 43 cents.

The history of the box continued to intrigue her, but in the kitchen Barbara mostly used newer recipes from her own vast cookbook collection, which had expanded into the hundreds. In 1988 she bought a new house in Madison, Wisconsin, and moved the older cookbooks to a cabinet in the basement. She tucked the little box in the back. There it sat, pretty much out of sight, if never totally out of mind. But it was not until January 2003 — 15 years later — that she succumbed to her curiosity. Barbara later explained: "As I got older, and older things became more meaningful to me, I realized how meaningful that recipe box had probably been to someone, and I wanted to give it back." It was a snowy Saturday morning. She reached into the cabinet for the weathered recipe box and thought, Today's the day to solve the mystery.

She sat down in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the box and began to look for clues. She found a lot of them — a letter with a recipe to "Mom" on the stationery of "Mrs. James Stolley," another letter addressed to "Stella," a recipe attributed to "Grandmother Stolley." Since there were no longer any Stolleys in the Pekin phone book, Barbara had to get creative. She came across a recipe bearing the name of a family whose large Victorian house had been bought and restored by her best friend from high school. She contacted her friend, who promised to investigate. Two months later, Barbara received an e-mail with addresses for twin brothers: Jim Stolley of Erie, Pennsylvania, and me, Dick Stolley, of New York City. In May she wrote to both of us asking for help.