The day Santa Iris disappeared is a blur to those still around to talk about it. The adults from that time are gone.

All the family knows is that Gumersindo Guzman left home on that day in 1949 with his 2-year-old daughter, and returned without her.

There were few answers as to what had become of her, no authorities called in to search, and no peace for an anguished Filomena, Mellisa’s great-grandmother.

“My great-grandfather never liked to talk about it,” Mellisa said, recounting the stories she grew up hearing. “My great-grandmother never spoke of specifics. She always just said she’d lost enough family members and to never stop looking.”

With no formal education beyond the first grade, Filomena could not read nor write, let alone launch a search for a missing child.

Had Santa Iris been taken? Had she been given away?

“There were many variations to that part of the story,” Mellisa said.

They say time heals all wounds. All it did for the Guzmans is muddy the waters of an already-murky time in the family’s history. In the vacuum, speculation filled the void.

The 1940s in Mayagüez were a time when family planning was unheard of, when Catholic couples had as many children as God allowed.

It was an era when families held to the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child,” Mellisa said. So it was not unusual for the man of the house to take a child to work for the day. Gumersindo, a farmhand and later a fisherman, was no different.

“You’ve got to give the woman a break sometimes,” Mellisa said. “So sometimes, my great-grandfather would take one of the children with him, one here, one there. There were just so many of them.

“Sometimes they’d go with a neighbor and come back the next day. Back then, that’s kind of really how it worked when they were little.”

Never before had a child not returned to the Guzman home.

Plenty, though, had been lost in other ways.