Lost my local mailboxes

I was gone for 5 days and had my iMac shut down. When I returned and fired up Mail, it acted like I had never been there before and it asked me to set up a new account. Naturally, all of the local mailboxes I had brought over from Thunderbird were nowhere to be found. How can these be recovered? When did they go? Where do the local mailboxes in Mail reside on the Mac?

Where do the local mailboxes in Mail reside on the Mac?

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Which version of OS X are you running? The user library folder is hidden by default in Lion and Mountain Lion. If you're using either one, you can press "Go" from the Finder menu and then press "Go to folder" to get to your user library folder.

Local mailboxes are here:

MacIntosh HD/Users/your name/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/

Lion 10.7.4. Will try what you suggested. I think what happened was the following but have no proof. I may have neglected to turn off the Mac before leaving. We had a bad thunderstorm while I was gone. The Mac may have lost power while I was away, and it may be that the Mail app had not been shut down properly. If not, then any changes I made would have been lost.

I am preparing to set the whole thing up one more time.