ST. PAUL — For 78 years, Pvt. Ben John Livingston’s life was as blank and mysterious as his unmarked grave.

On Saturday, just in time for Memorial Day, his grave at the Markville Cemetery in northeastern Minnesota was adorned with a brand new veteran’s marker and visited by a Roseville woman whose quest to bring him recognition for his service helped heal her own heart in the process.

“I am satisfied and happy and I think he can rest easy now knowing he has not been forgotten,” said Deborah Costandine, who has been researching Livingston’s history for the past few years to honor an uncle’s dying request.

“There are people out there who knew and loved him,” she told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Livingston was a member of the Leech Lake Reservation. To honor his traditions, Costandine sprinkled tobacco around his grave, burned sage to cleanse away any negative energy and hung a dream catcher to filter out any bad dreams.

The ritual was just as healing for Costandine, whose father was abused as a child in an Indian school and repeated the cycle in his own family.

“It’s such a relief,” she said. “This is something good.”

Piecing together Livingston’s life has been like putting together the far-flung fragments of an exploded puzzle.

Costandine searched newspaper archives, Indian census rolls, U.S. Army records and court documents to try to understand who he was, yet there are still several missing pieces.

Livingston was born Feb. 26, 1916, in Leech Lake Township, Cass County, Minn. At least that’s what his Army draft card says.

The Indian census from 1916 lists him as being born July 9. A court document uses the February birthday but lists 1917 as the year.

The Indian census shows Livingston was born to John and Mable Livingston. The youngest of three, he had a sister named Lizzie and a brother named Lewis.

All of his family members had Ojibwe and English names. But his is only recorded in English.

His father was drafted to serve in World War I. His mother died when he was young. He was adopted by another Native American family. That mother and his sister died of tuberculosis.

Livingston attended two Indian schools while growing up: in Odanah, Wis., at age 8 and later in Pipestone, Minn. When he was 15, he quit school and went to work.

It was during this time he lived with Costandine’s uncle, George, and George’s mother Della Costandine.

George grew up believing Livingston was his blood-relative cousin. It was George’s family who was listed in his Army records as his emergency contact and it was George’s family who retrieved his body and gave him a proper burial in the Markville Cemetery in Pine County, Minn.

And it was George who in his 80s began thinking back over his life and remembered that Livingston never got a marker for his grave. This bothered him.

“When you’re older, you do kind of ponder and reflect on things,” said Nita Fitsgibbons, George’s daughter. They live in Colorado. “He was 12 years old when Ben died. He felt he was just dropped off and kind of forgotten.”

George asked his daughter to make sure Livingston got a headstone. She got things started but hit a wall when she learned that Livingston’s military records had been destroyed by a fire.

Costandine, who had always looked to George’s family as the stable, fun family she wished she had, jumped in to help.

Together, they were able to find enough information to justify Livingston getting a veteran grave marker.

“It’s been really cool to make one of my dad’s dreams come true,” Fitsgibbons said.

Livingston’s death was as mysterious and tragic as his life.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He was 26 — or 27.

His draft card describes him as a 5-foot, 10-inch “Indian” with brown hair and eyes who “looks young for his age.”

Court documents describe him as being an engineer, but what exactly he did in the Army was lost in 1973 when his records, kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Mo., were lost in a fire.

All that is known now is that he was on a train in Canada on furlough when he died.

Sandwiched between a War Bonds advertisement and a story about Hitler is a brief in the Star-Phoenix newspaper March 9, 1943, about a soldier who froze to death on a train in Saskatchewan.

“The United States soldier whose frozen body was found Friday on the tender of an eastbound train was identified as Pte. Ben Jack Livingston, 26,” it reads.

An inquest March 16 reported that he died “by misadventure from alcoholism and exposure to cold while riding between the engine and tender of C.N.R train No. 2 between 12:25 o’clock and 1:53 o’clock on the morning of March 5.”

He boarded the train at Edmonton with other soldiers. He had a ticket to ride, which was found in his pocket. But at a train station partway through the journey, he tried to disembark wearing no shoes, hat or coat.

“When asked where he was going, the soldier had not acted normally,” the Star-Phoenix reported March 23, “but said the train might blow up.”

He was escorted back onto the train for departure. At a later stop, a train worker found his lifeless body.

“As a mental health practitioner and certified peer, I wonder what Ben was feeling, thinking and experiencing in that moment,” Costandine said. “Was he experiencing the effects of PTSD? Did the roar of the coal-driven locomotive and the alcohol fuel a dissociative flashback to combat? We’ll never know … but he was obviously frightened enough to find a place he felt safe, outside of the train and in the coal tender.”

It took two more years before Livingston’s body was laid to rest in the rural cemetery.

The Askov American newspaper reported that on Aug. 9, 1945, Livingston was buried with military honors. Caretakers of the cemetery said they often wondered who was buried in the unmarked grave.

Now, the world knows. It was Ben John Livingston. Orphan, Ojibwe, engineer and veteran.

“I’m glad it worked out,” Costandine said, waving the sage smoke over his grave Saturday. “I’m glad that George has some peace, too.” She hopes to get the names of Livingston, his brother and father on the Leech Lake Wall of Warriors.

To Livingston, she said, “I feel like I got to know you better. Be at peace.”