The ashes of a former Stratford resident were laid to rest Friday, nearly half a century after his death.

The burial of Freeman Barber was the culmination of a decades-long odyssey for a complete stranger – and for Barber’s family, closure of a sort they’d believed they already had until very recently.

Present for the ceremony was Laurie Barber, Freeman’s descendant and the family historian.

According to his research, Freeman Barber was born in Everton, Ont., in 1883.

A railway engineer by trade, he married a woman from Stratford and moved to that city, where the couple had two children.

In 1927, he moved to the Buffalo area, where he died 40 years later.

It was a simple story from a generation gone by. The kind of story Laurie Barber encounters all the time in his genealogical research.

At least until he got an email from someone in upstate New York who claimed to have had the remains of Barber’s great-uncle in his possession for the past 37 years.

“He has been on my desk or under my desk or next to my desk since 1979,” Murray Henry said Friday in an interview.

As Henry tells it, he ended up with the ashes while working at the sheriff’s office of Ontario County, which is part of the Rochester metropolitan area.

He got a call from a woman who found an urn containing ashes while cleaning out an RV warehouse in the city of Canandaigua.

At his supervisor’s urging, he told the woman that it was up to her to decide what to do with the ashes.

On his way home from work that night, he went by the warehouse, pulled in and saw that the woman was still there.

“She said ‘You take this,’ and I did,” he recalled.

Over the years, Henry and his wife tried to figure out who Freeman Barber was and what to do with his ashes – always running into roadblocks.

“All of the sources of information I had access to were from the States, and I found nothing,” he said.

Earlier this year, Henry’s wife discovered Barber’s family history website, and sent him an email about the ashes.

He was skeptical at first – the family, understandably, believed Freeman Barber was buried in the cemetery in Stratford – but soon realized the Henrys’ story must be true.

“It’s magical, it’s mysterious and it’s wonderful,” he said Friday.

In some respects, the mystery continues. It’s still not clear how Freeman Barber’s remains ended up in the RV factory.

Laurie Barber says his great-uncle’s daughter was married to an RV salesman who died a few months after Freeman Barber did, and he could have put them there for some reason.

For Barber, who describes genealogy as “putting together a puzzle,” being able to give his great-uncle a proper burial is satisfying enough.

“To find a piece I didn’t know was missing is just very special,” he said.

With reporting by Victoria Levy