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What started out as a family project turned into an interesting book that is both history and research documentary.

Marilyn Jeffers Walton, an Oxford resident and author of six children's books, wrote "Rhapsody in Junk: A Daughter's Return to Germany to Finish Her Father's Story" after her father's death. The book followed research to answer a question that had bothered him since his World War II prisoner of war experience.

Her father, 2nd Lt. Thomas F. Jeffers, was the bombardier of a B-24 bomber shot down over Germany in June 1944, less than a year before the end of the war in Europe. One member of the crew died that day under mysterious circumstances and buried.

Jeffers had always wondered what had happened to his crewmate.

After Jeffers suffered several strokes, Walton decided to research what information might be available about the missing member of the crew of the plane, nicknamed Rhapsody in Junk.

"It started when my dad began to fail," she said. "It started out being for my family but as I learned more about how much information is out there, it turned into something more extensive. It grew and grew and grew."

The book is written in two parts. The first part reads like historical novel, telling the story of the Rhapsody in Junk and her crew. In the second part of the book, Walton tells the intriguing story of her research and the many different directions it took as she traveled to Germany and spoke to people who saw her father and the other crewmembers fall out of the sky that Sunday morning 63 years ago.

She visited Stalag Luft III in Poland where her father was held. It was the prison where "The Great Escape" of movie fame had occurred in 1943, prompting even more intense security while Jeffers was held there.

Jeffers had also been among the prisoners evacuated from the camp under orders from Adolph Hitler that following winter and marched more than 60 miles on foot as the Russians closed in from the east.

Walton recounts many personal stories from that march, including such memories as Allied prisoners carrying rifles for the German soldiers, who were also suffering during the march in the coldest winter in 50 years.

"It was just a big group of people trying to survive," Walton said.

Walton tells enough of the story of the crew members' civilian lives to show that they are just young Americans caught up in the war effort like many others but who had the misfortune to be captured.

That made it enough of a story about others in the war as the specific crew in the story.

The aspect that is fascinating about the second part of the book is that Walton tells her own story about her research work and the resources she found online, through the Pentagon and European governments.

Anyone with a relative who served in the military during World War II, can use many of those same resources to learn more about someone who died in the war or who got home and has died since. Those same military veterans can use them to find the people with whom they served.

She found generous cooperation from the German people who were in the area when her father's plane went down, but also from the German government and even other governments which had been behind the Iron Curtain for many years after the war ended.

Walton said that those former Communist governments kept huge amounts of records that were not available until the Iron Curtain fell and now can be tapped for information about those who served in the European Theater during the war.