She wouldn't have been captured by the Japanese or frolicked on an idyllic tropical island. Conventional wisdom says she ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Thrasher and Gillespie, a former aviation insurance accident investigator, work out of a home office in Wilmington, Del., packed with Ameliana. There are the crumbling fragments of an Amelia-size woman's shoe, a sheet of aluminum that could be from her Lockheed Electra if only the rivet pattern were different, and a paper trail documenting bones found on the island in 1940. And it has become a matter of pride.
Most historians endure their share of tedium.
On learning that Boston widow Lydia Bixby had lost all five of her sons in the war, Lincoln ostensibly sent her a brief but exquisite letter of consolation. The 1864 letter, considered by Lincoln scholars to be a masterpiece on par with the Gettysburg Address, attained even greater fame when it was read at the start of the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan. Tradition says she loathed Lincoln and tore up the letter. The historian compared each word in the letter with the words in a database of Lincoln's writings. And he found a copy of the letter pasted in a scrapbook Hay kept of his media mentions.