BOSTON—Earlier this month, a construction worker laboring on the new American Wing at this city's Museum of Fine Arts knocked a hole in a wall and discovered an envelope containing a typewritten note from 1926. The author was another laborer who was overseeing the workers building the museum’s wing that year.

Now his story has become the focus of an intense research effort by Maureen Melton, an historian and director of the museum’s libraries and archives. Shortly after the letter’s discovery, she began a far-ranging genealogical investigation, assembling a team of local historians, city officials, church record-keepers, and neighborhood archivists to find out as much as she could about the letter writer and his life. Thanks to their help, and using the power of the Internet, she’s been able to piece together in recent weeks a biography of Thomas Crowley, a laborer from Dorchester who lived through both world wars and the Great Depression. As the project continues, Melton plans to blog her findings and make all the information available on the MFA's Facebook page.

Read more at the Boston Globe.