If you're just joining us, this is Chapter 9. You'll get more out of this story if you start from the beginning. Read Chapter 1 here.

See the previous part, Chapter 8, here.

Was a decades-old mystery about to be solved?

Her mother died when she was 3 months old, and her father, with six older children, could not care for a seventh. Her uncle, so the family story goes, took the train to a funeral one day and came home with a baby.

By the time she was 12, she would be orphaned again and left to the care of older cousins who lived in a 19th-century farmhouse 30 miles north of Davenport, Iowa.

A few years later, she would be working as a servant for a well-to-do family who lived in a mansion on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River.

As one relative put it, she felt her family turned her back on her, so she turned her back on the family.

We don’t know how she met the man she would marry.

We do know that she was the mother of Sharon Elliott, the Arizona woman known as the Hatbox Baby, and she was nearly five months pregnant when she married.

The man she married came from Iowa farm stock as well, growing up near the towns of Buffalo and Blue Grass, about 15 miles south of Davenport.

His mother, prim and proper, came from a well-to-do family that owned a prosperous lumber business. His father owned a large farm in the rich bottomland along the Mississippi, and together the men in the family ran a threshing business, helping other farm families at harvest time.

And we know that he was Sharon's father.

A family history finally revealed

DNA genealogist Bonnie Belza had been closing in on the mystery for weeks.

She had isolated several distinct family lines in Sharon's DNA. For 30 years, we had searched for this connection in an attempt to solve the mystery of the baby found abandoned in a hatbox in the Arizona desert on Christmas Eve of 1931.

Those family lines, Strackbein, Roth, and Kautz, belonged to German immigrants who had settled near Davenport in the 1850s.

They came from Wunderthausen, a town in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, with a history that dates to the early 1300s, according to a community profile by Dr. Paul Riedesel.

Under Prussian rule in the 1800s, the region had transformed from a feudal society in which peasants were not allowed to own land to a more egalitarian system. But inheritance rules favored the oldest children, meaning there was little opportunity for younger siblings to own land. The winters were harsh, taxation was high, and military service was compulsory.

As transatlantic transportation improved, hundreds took the opportunity to emigrate. Among them were members of the Strackbein family, who settled in and around the town of Wheatland, Iowa, and nearby Lowden.

On Dec. 19, two days after Sharon's 86th birthday, Bonnie emailed me.

“The couple that are possibly the parents of Sharon are Freda Strackbein (b 1908 d 1991) and Walter Kautz Roth (b 1909 d 2005),” she said.

Freda Strackbein and Walter Kautz Roth.

For the first time since I began writing about Sharon Elliott’s quest to find who could have abandoned her as an infant in the desert, there was a plausible theory, one that was based on science and evidence-based reasoning.

Bonnie told me that Walter and Freda had married on Aug. 1, 1931 — four and a half months before Sharon Elliott was born — and that they had another child who was born in 1933.

If Bonnie was right, that meant Sharon had a brother she never knew.

It also meant a whole new layer of complexity to the Hatbox Baby mystery: Why would a married couple give up their baby, even if it had been conceived out of wedlock, and how did that baby get from Iowa to the Arizona desert?

Bonnie had traced both Walter and Freda’s family trees extensively and was confident she had the right couple. But there still could be other possibilities. What if Walter’s brother had been the father? That would produce roughly the same DNA match.

I was excited by Bonnie’s news, but I had to be cautious about what I shared with Sharon. The first time I’d brought up DNA testing in 2011 turned into a crushing disappointment for her, and I’d seen enough dead ends to know this, as promising as it looked, could be another one.

I decided I would tell her that Bonnie had isolated several family lines and describe the German and eastern Iowa connections without naming Walter and Freda.

I drove out the sprawling care home in East Mesa where Sharon was trying without much luck to rehab her broken hip. In all the years I knew her, I never heard Sharon utter a cross word, but I know she didn’t think much of the food there. Whenever I visited I always asked if I could bring her anything next time. The answer was usually “snacks.”

Chester’s Puffcorn was her favorite, and I brought two bags with me, along with some Hershey’s kisses for her sweet tooth.

But when I got there, Sharon wasn’t there, and because I wasn’t a direct family member, the staff couldn’t tell me where she’d gone.

I called Sharon’s granddaughter, who told me Sharon had taken a turn for the worse and was in the intensive care unit.

I drove to Banner Baywood and found her room. The nurses said it was OK for her to have a visitor. I found her sitting up picking at her hospital food.

She said she was on the mend and would be out in a couple of days.

I decided to stick with my plan and describe what Bonnie had found in general terms.

“You’ve been busy,” Sharon said.

But Bonnie had been busier.

She’d combed Newspapers.com and not only found Walter and Freda’s obituaries, but also their wedding announcement, which noted that for their honeymoon, the couple planned to take “an extended trip to Sioux City and points west.”

Did points west mean Arizona?

Bonnie also found an obituary for their son.

James Evan Roth, perhaps the brother Sharon never knew, had just died two weeks earlier.

A long-lost sibling

I decided to wait until after the holidays to contact his family.

When I did, I told the woman on the phone who I was and a little bit about Sharon’s case.

Then I told her it was very likely that James had a sibling he never knew about.

She told me it was a lot to take in and asked me to write everything down in an email.

I called her a week later. She seemed perplexed about how DNA could identify Walter and Freda as the parents if neither they nor their son had taken a DNA test. I tried to explain, and then told her she could settle the question — and provide the answers Sharon had been seeking for 30 years — if she would take a DNA test. I told her I would pay for it.

She said it was out of the question.

It wasn’t the answer I had been expecting.

When I asked why, she told me that if her ancestors had gone to their graves with a secret, it wasn’t her place to expose it.

I would drive out to California twice to try to convince her to change her mind, but with no luck.

If we were to prove Walter and Freda were definitely Sharon Elliott’s birth parents, we would need to do it without their son’s family.

We would need a lucky break.

A new DNA connection

It would come four months later.

DNA tests are not static snapshots in time. When you submit your saliva sample, the results become part of the database of whatever company you’ve chosen to go with. As more people take tests, their results are added to the database.

In April of 2018, a new match showed up in Sharon’s DNA profile. It was a strong connection, in the first-cousin range.

Bonnie reached out. The connection turned out to be a 39-year-old woman who lived near Davenport, Iowa.

Her name was Emily Dodds Farro. She was married, had two children, and owned a small business with her husband, who is a U.S. Army veteran.

And she was an adoptee looking for her birth parents.

Emily’s DNA not only tied her directly to Sharon, but also to Walter and Freda Roth. And it connected them all in a way that confirmed that Walter and Freda were Sharon’s birth parents.

Even though Bonnie had isolated Sharon’s most likely birth parents months earlier, I had avoided giving Sharon the details because I wanted to be sure, and though we had the who, we still didn’t have the how or why the Hatbox Baby got from Iowa to the middle of the Arizona desert.

But after Emily’s DNA profile surfaced, providing concrete proof that Sharon was the daughter of Walter Kautz Roth and Freda Strackbein Roth, I decided to lay it out for Sharon. I told her everything I knew about Walter and Freda and their son James, the brother Sharon never knew she had.

I even showed her pictures.

She showed no reaction at all.

I asked her about it on my next visit.

She said she’d given the pictures and the family tree information to her great-grandson, Erik Clark, to take care of.

I asked her if the reason she didn’t feel a connection was because those were the people who didn’t want her.

She smiled and shrugged and said, “Could be.”

It was clearly a lot to take in. When I finally told her about Emily, she was thrilled and began referring to Emily as her niece.

Even if that was the only thing that came out of our 30-year search, it would have been enough.

Another adopted child gets answers

When you send in your DNA sample, you open yourself up to certain risks, and one of those is learning things you would rather not have known. Sharon willingly took that risk. She knew her birth parents could have been poor or criminals or that she could have been conceived in scandal or shame.

As a journalist writing about other people’s DNA tests, I began to learn that I would also face similar risks. People who had willingly made their results public in their own quests for answers had put me in the position of having information that others would rather I did not have.

From Emily’s DNA profile, Bonnie was able to find Emily's branch in the family tree and identify her birth mother — a relative of James Roth.

I was caught in the middle. If I tried to pursue the relative with this new information, it could jeopardize any chance Emily had of trying to connect with her birth mother. But Emily could also jeopardize any chance I had of getting this person to help me paint the picture of Walter and Freda and find out how and why Sharon wound up in the desert on Christmas Eve of 1931.

I decided to step back and see how things with Emily and her birth mother played out.

It did not go well.

She reached out several times by phone and by mail. She sent a letter with pictures of her children and a description of her life in Iowa.

It was returned. She sent a certified letter. In it, she thanked her birth mother for giving her the gift of life. She told her she had been blessed with a wonderful adoptive family (who supported her in her search), along with a loving husband, two terrific children, and a successful business.

That too was returned.

With that, Emily decided she would respect her birth mother’s wishes to be left alone.

While her attempts to contact her birth mother were disappointing, Emily was delighted to learn she was related to Sharon and sent her a card with photos of her children.

In November, I told Sharon I would be going to Iowa at the end of the month to find out more about Walter and Freda. She was more interested in whether I was going to see Emily.

I told her I would.

In the meantime, I wanted to do as much research as I could in advance so I could make the most of my trip.

The quest to solve the mystery of the Hatbox Baby is one filled with remarkable coincidences. I just happened to pick up the phone when Sharon called. DNA genealogist Bonnie Belza just happened to be in the audience when I told Sharon’s story. Emily Farro just happened to be looking for her birth mother and provided the link that would prove Sharon’s birth parents.

But none of those coincidences were as random or bizarre as one that would occur before I left for Iowa.

the benshoof coincidence

After an early morning fitness class, I ran into a fellow class member at the Starbucks across the parking lot. We talked a bit about our jobs, and I mentioned a couple of stories I’d written along with the one I was currently working on — the Hatbox Baby.

As we parted, he gave me his card and asked me to email him a story I’d written on Barry Goldwater.

Later that day, I was going over a story from a Davenport newspaper about Walter and Freda’s wedding. I was thinking about sending a description of Freda’s wedding dress to a fashion historian to see if I could learn anything about her economic circumstances or station in life.

The article mentioned Freda’s maid of honor, Mrs. Floyd Benshoof, who was Walter’s sister.

I grabbed the card my new gym friend had given me. His name was Steven Benshoof.

What were the odds? And how many Benshoofs could there be?

I called Bonnie, and she looked up Floyd Benshoof, Walter's brother-in-law, on the family tree. Sure enough, there was a descendant named Steven.

I called Steve and got him in his car as he and his wife were driving to Mexico for a long weekend.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. “But remember that story about the Hatbox Baby I told you about? You’re related to her.”

At first, he was incredulous, but then when I explained where the pieces of the puzzle fit, he offered to put me in touch with his brother, who is the family genealogist.

His brother put me in touch with a cousin who had complied an extensive genealogy on the Kautz Roth family and had traveled to Iowa and met people in Blue Grass who were likely to have known Walter and Freda.

The first person I should talk to, he said, was Paul Barnes, the longtime mayor of Blue Grass.

A friend of the Hatbox Baby's parents

When I called, he was more than eager to help. He not only knew James Roth as a boy, but he remembered Walter and Freda as well. After 30 years of searching, he was the first person I had talked to who actually knew the parents of the Hatbox Baby.

We agreed to meet the following week, and he said he'd try to contact some other people who might be able to help.

I also made arrangements to visit the Special Collections department of the Davenport Public Library, which is known for its genealogical research and would provide a key piece of evidence about Walter and Freda.

I called Emily and told her I was coming as well.

And then I went to visit Sharon and ask her if there was anything she wanted me to bring her from Iowa. She wasn't at the care home. I drove to Banner Baywood and found her in the second-floor ICU unit.

She was sleeping, and I didn't want to wake her, so I left a note telling her I'd see her when I got back.

I sensed time was running out.

NEXT: Chapter 10 — The story ends, but not without final complications

Reach the reporter at john.danna@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter at @azgreenday.