"She did a very good job of changing her identity," said grandniece Jennifer Kitt. "But when she died, it was as if she was saying 'Here I am.' We would have never found her if we hadn't found her obituary." Kitt said on Thursday that the 71-year-old woman who died in Massachusetts last month was in fact the daughter of Charles and Adeline Cowman Embrey.

Embrey had vanished from North Platte in 1953.

Twylia Embrey had revealed her identity, where she was from and who her parents were, on her deathbed to a longtime friend. The friend put the names of her parents in an obituary, which Kitt later found.

"(The friend) said Twylia didn't know her family was looking for her," Kitt said. "She was certain we had given up on her. All these years, we have been searching. Her friend said if Twylia had known, she would have been so happy." Embrey was the second to last of eight children who grew up on a farm near Maywood in Frontier County.

A few years ago Detective Steve Ainsworth of the Boulder County Sheriff's Office in Colorado became involved in the mystery when the Embrey family contacted his department. Family members asked whether an unidentified woman slain in Boulder in 1954 might have been Embrey.

That theory was disproved by DNA tests, but Ainsworth said he was able to confirm the recent discovery.

Ainsworth said he contacted Embrey's friend in Massachusetts, who described the story behind Twylia's disappearance: When Twylia Embrey was about 18, her father wanted her to marry an older man. She wanted nothing to do with the man, so she ran off, changed her name immediately and got a new Social Security number when she arrived in Massachusetts.

"She just traveled around the country," Ainsworth said.

Margie Danbom was 19 when her sister disappeared.

"She was going to help me plan a birthday party for my daughter," Danbom said. "She came down once, but then she up and disappeared.

"We couldn't talk about it, because Dad would yell and scream and Mom bawled." The Embreys searched for their daughter, even traveling to California.

"Dad thought she was there because our sister June was there," Danbom said. "She was only 11 when Twylia left; she didn't know anything about it." "Our sad time is over," Danbom said. "We all grieved for her for years, and now it's the whole thing all over again. I used to dream about her coming and knocking on my door." Their father died in 1971," Danbom said.

"If she had a problem with him, why didn't she contact someone after he died?" Danbom wondered.

According to Detective Ainsworth, "Her friend said Twylia told her she had written some letters to her sisters and they came back." Embrey eventually married and worked as a typist in an insurance office.

"She had a wonderful life," Kitt said. "She had a wonderful husband" but was unable to have any children.

Kitt said she's spent the past two years trying to solve the mystery of her great-aunt.

"I can't believe we have an ending," Kitt said.