I dial the number in the blog post with trepidation as soon as the time change on the West Coast is at a decent hour.

"Hello, may I please speak to Charlette?" I ask.

"I'm sorry," the person answers a bit sleepily, "there's no Charlotte here."

I don't correct her about the pronunciation of my sister-in-law's name.

"I'm looking for a Charlette from New Orleans with a son of the name that you mention in your post online," I say. A light of recognition goes on. The person warms up to me, as fellow seekers in a dark, dark night.

"Yes, we're looking for Ricky, but it must be a different Ricky," she says softly. "We haven't found him yet either." We both fall silent for a moment as the flicker of connection flares, then dies.

She's fully awake now that the gnaw of unknowing has begun chewing at her conscious mind. I know, because I have a hole there too.

It's day 30 in my search for relatives and friends missing from Aug. 29, when Hurricane Katrina stormed into the Gulf Coast. I've been on the computer and the phone every day -- scrolling through online messages, searching the faces of the missing children, posting missing ads like messages in a bottle.

Like a fisherman, I cast my line out and occasionally get a tug. Most days are like today, a tease that leaves the phone line limp and me hopeless.

In my doctoral research at the University of Central Florida, I use patchwork quilts as a metaphor for a digital technology, capturing the fabric quilt's qualities to map a community's stories. So after the hurricane, I adapted the prototype software I was working on to put it to finding the missing from Katrina.

The Digital Story Quilt for Katrina Survivors and Family is the result. Katrina survivors, family and anyone else can post photos of the missing, memorialize lost people and places, and tell their stories. Each is a patch on this digital quilt where users can explore the layers of photos, fabric and text. Just like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina is a historic event. Typically the media are the first cut at history; then authorities in history books are the last. The everyday, personal stories get discarded in our cultural memory.

The idea of my research is to capture this alternate history -- the folklore of forgotten peoples -- and reinscribe history with these voices. And it is these stories of hope, prayers, and memories on the Digital Story Quilt that I warm myself with to search again another day.