In the multi-ethnic immigration paradise of Minnesota's Iron Range, a woman's suspicion that her husband might be cheating on her leads to the unexpected response from the private investigator she hired. He is, instead, spending the time investigating his adoption at the request of their adult daughters, who had submitted a DNA test and through it connected him with a nearby relative. Bringing in a professional genealogist to expedite solving the puzzle of how on earth they might be related to each other leads the family through photo albums, newspapers on microfilm, the mystery of an abandoned toddler a generation earlier, census records, the frequent illegibility of cursive handwriting in historical records, rum-running on the Great Lakes during Prohibition, the propensity of upper midwestern girls to go to beaches in California for winter break, cross-border migration between the US and Canada, the wonders of multi-lingual phonetic spelling, and other adventures through the past to some unanticipated results in the present.
