grave.  Filled with this idea he came to America as soon as he was grown and landed in New York, but his few poor clues availed him little against the difficulties of poverty and a new and complex environment.  In the end he gave up the search, married, and settled down on the east side.  After the sudden quarrel which led to his leaving home, his wife thought it possible that his old obsession might have reawakened.  The Bureau, supplied with the clues in question, had little difficulty in discovering the father’s burial place in St. Louis; and the cemetery authorities promised to send word if the missing husband should appear.  Sure enough, a short time afterward he arrived, and, after visiting the grave, returned, not unwillingly, and took up his family duties again under the supervision of a probation officer.

The flexibility of method and the readiness to see and utilize new resources which are displayed in the foregoing account are great assets to the one who must institute search for a missing husband and father.

The thing that sets desertion cases apart in a class of peculiar technical difficulty for the case worker is not simply that the man is away from his family.  There is no man to deal with in a widow’s family, but widows’ families present comparatively simple problems.  The deserter, though absent, is still not only a potential but also a real factor in the family situation.  The plans of the family are often made with one eye to his return; he is the unseen but plainly felt obstacle to much that the social worker wants to accomplish.  The children look forward to his reappearance with dread or with joy (for many deserters have a way with them, decidedly, and are welcome visitors to their children).  In short, he is usually at the key point in the situation.  No plan can safely be made that leaves him out, but—­there’s the rub!—­you cannot include him at once for he is not to be reached, certainly not at the outset.  The discovery of the deserter’s whereabouts is not only the first but the most urgent of the problems that confront the worker who tries to deal with a deserted family.  Unless he can be found the whole plan rests upon shifting sand.

A prompt and vigorous effort to find the absentee is therefore a first requisite in dealing with family desertion.  Unfortunately, many case workers, having started bravely and exhausted the first crop of clues, become discouraged and fall back on the supposition that the man is permanently out of the scene, and that it only remains to make plans for the family.  Numberless case histories attest the unwisdom of this assumption.  It is not making an extreme statement to say that, as long as the family remains under active care or until the missing man is proved to be dead, the effort to find him should not be abandoned.  Mr. Carstens, in discussing this point, says: