The family, including 5-year-old George, packed whatever they could carry and boarded an overloaded train to El Paso. For years afterward, the often-destitute Romneys moved from house to house, from California to Idaho to Utah. Gaskell eventually rebuilt his life, constructing homes in Salt Lake City and becoming bishop of the church's wealthiest ward. In the Great Depression, Gaskell "lost all he had and more," a family biography says.

He regained his financial footing from an unlikely source: Mexico. He had never given up trying to obtain financial compensation from the Mexican government for losing his family property.

Twenty-six years after the Romneys were forced from Mexico, the case of "Gaskell Romney vs. United States of Mexico" was heard in Salt Lake City in 1938. Gaskell requested $28,753 in damages. He was awarded $9,163, court records show — a sizable amount then.

The records say Gaskell gave half of the award to his son, George, which would have helped to put him on his road to becoming chairman of American Motors and governor of Michigan.

In 1941, three years after receiving the Mexican financial settlement, the Romneys made a sentimental return to Mexico, retracing the route of Miles P. Romney and his wives from Utah to Arizona to Mexico. Throughout the journey, Gaskell told George about his hardships but also his pride in establishing the remote Mormon outpost.

"Despite his many hardships he was never bitter about them," George wrote about his father. "His religion and the Kingdom of God always came first, and as a result he enabled his children to live through economic difficulties without their feeling deprived or losing faith in their future."

It was a lesson that George would impart to Mitt.

Mission test

Mitt Romney's missionary work began not in glamorous Paris but in gritty Le Havre, a seaport along the English Channel.

The one-bedroom apartment that he shared with three other missionaries had no telephone, no television and no radio. There were also no Mormons in Le Havre, so the four American missionaries would hold worship in their apartment, taking turns preaching and singing and offering each other the sacrament of bread and water.

"I remember we went down and we went to a place where they had used mattresses off of ships, and so these mattresses were quite good mattresses but they were very narrow, and so we got some cinder blocks and some plywood doors and a mattress and that's what we had for beds," said Donald K. Miller, then Romney's senior companion, and now a dentist in Calgary.

The missionaries would wake up at 6 a.m., eat breakfast, study the Bible, the Book of Mormon and French, and knock on doors, with breaks for meals and a required bedtime of 10 p.m. They traveled on Solex motorized bicycles, wearing their suits and carrying satchels with pamphlets about Mormonism.