Author Norah Labinar writes about the disappearance of her great-uncle, Barton Kestle: I never knew my great uncle Barton Kestle. He disappeared before I was born. He belongs, too, to a disappeared world of typewriters and teacups. In old family photographs he is captured in profile, always off to the side, distant, blurred, as though trying to escape the camera. On a Saturday night in March 1954, he boarded a train and was never seen again. I suppose that he dreamed of escape; who doesn’t? Who didn’t? Who hasn’t? I myself once vanished in the woods for three days, and when I came back to the world, I had no memory, but was carrying a broken music box. Barton Kestle was the ghost of my childhood. I found him everywhere and nowhere at once. He was no longer the quiet museum curator trapped in black-and-white pictures. He was the one who grabbed Eichmann on Garibaldi Street. He broke up Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He was a spy. He went to Hollywood. He was writing mystery novels in Paris. He invented invisible ink. I was certain so many times that I saw his face—on the street, on television, in a crowd. And then he was gone. When the Curator's Office was discovered in a renovation of the museum in 2011—uncovered, really, as a walled-up city at an archeological dig—the artifacts of his life were found preserved: an umbrella, a magnifying glass, a stopped clock. I confess: I wanted to find a clue to his disappearance. I found instead a pair of galoshes, a novel by Henry James, a black telephone, a ball of twine, and a box of chocolate creams. I found the chalk outline around a missing person. The curator’s room is a box that does not open or close. It proves that a life can be measured out in a coffee spoon or misplaced like a train ticket. The clock in the curator’s office is still right twice a day. There is a secret that even time will not tell. There is an art to absence. And you can walk through any doorway into a story. Here then is the absence of Barton Kestle. When I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) recently to see the special Matisse exhibit, I also wandered past period rooms and through galleries housing MIA's Modern and Contemporary collections.  I happened onto Barton Kestle's closet-sized office where Norah Labinar's story is prominently posted. The following explanation comes from an article written for ARTNews by Robin Cembalest:  On March 27, 1954, Barton Kestle, first curator of modern art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, boarded a train for Washington, D.C., and was never seen again. A shy specialist in the Soviet Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism, Kestle had usually worked late into the night at the museum’s grand McKim, Mead & White building, his office placed near the front entrance so he wouldn’t trip up alarms. This explains how staff came to accidentally seal and paint over his door during a rushed construction job some time in the ’50s. Two years ago, employees found his door and stepped into Kestle’s world. Curator Elizabeth Armstrong surveyed the vintage habitat of the forgotten Modernist scholar—his art and books; his high-tech-at-the-time Underwood Model 150 Typewriter, Polaroid Land Camera, and Graflex filmstrip projector; his clock radio and the other streamlined, mass-produced objects wearing their Deco heritage proudly; his ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. She saw not just a time capsule, but an opportunity. And that’s how the Minneapolis Institute got its newest period room. Or not. I was certainly taken in by the story. However, the truth is the 1950s-era office is part of a contemporary-art exhibition called "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness" — coined from the word Stephen Colbert spawned in 2005. I encourage you to go see the MIA exhibit. What does this posting have to do with Irish genealogy? Not much, other than:

• Seven of Stephen Colbert's eight great-grandparents were of Irish origin.
• Most families have mysterious tales based on family lore. Stories that are never fully researched or confirmed but are repeated so often they become truthiness.