Family stories feature twists and turns that don't show up on genealogy sites

Molly Reed Shay was known as "most beautiful" in St. Patrick’s Church, Iowa City, Iowa, 

So says a description printed in tiny letters on a genealogy chart put together by one of my relatives and now in my hands in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in this pandemic year of 2020.

Not sure if St. Patrick’s conducted a beauty pageant but highly unlikely in Iowa’s Mississippi River Valley in the latter part of the 19^th century.  It might have been an observation by a fellow parishioner, possibly a young man with an eye for beauty. It may have been a line spoken at Molly’s funeral in September 1905. Molly died in childbirth on Sept. 18 of that year. Her husband, Michael Francis Shay, might have said it as part of his eulogy if he could have managed to say anything after such a devastating loss.

Molly was not yet 40 and had already birthed five children, two girls and three boys, the eldest being my paternal grandfather, Raymond Arthur Shay. The sixth, Richard, was born the same day his mother died. Raymond later told his grandchildren, me included, that the doctor charged with delivering Richard was drunk. It was a terrible memory for Raymond, who would have been 11 at the time, old enough to be helping out on the Shay farm in what is now Iowa City suburb.

As I wrote this, I thought about what it was like to be 11. My mom gave birth to twins when I was a bit older at 12. I also was the eldest of what would eventually be nine kids. We lived in a drafty old two-story house in Wichita, Kansas. Imagine it was 1905 and we lived on a farm in Wichita’s outskirts and my mom went into labor at home and a drunken doctor came for the delivery and he botched it so that my mother died. Motherless at 12. It would have left a mark that I would feel all of my life.

I can’t say what it did to my grandfather. We called him Big Danny. I hung that nickname on him as a mouthy toddler. Baby Danny was my new brother in 1952 and Grandpa seemed like Big Danny to me. My reasoning is unclear. I was just a little kid with a big imagination.

Molly’s storied beauty passed down to her granddaughters. Muriel, whom I met as a kid growing up in Denver, was homecoming queen at her high school – it says so on the genealogical chart. Muriel’s brother Bobby “took his own life when his mother died in 1934.” Their mother Gertrude (Gertie) died at 33. Molly’s great-granddaughter, Christy, was “homecoming queen at Cherry Creek High” which once was the Denver area’s largest high school and adjacent to its swankiest neighborhood, Cherry Hills. I reported on football and soccer games at its stadium when I covered high school sports for The Denver Post.

Speaking of me, I am mentioned on the chart. Muriel’s other daughter, Jill Scott, was “born 12-19-50, 1 day later than Mike T. Shay. Movie pictures were taken of them when they were babies.” I never saw the film. My mother said that I was a beautiful baby and photogenic but that was my mother speaking.

One more family connection with the line of people spawned by Michael Francis and Molly Shay. Her daughter Marie married Glenn Schafbuch and their son Mickey, born in 1934, went into the Marines after college and later managed television stations in Denver and Portland, Ore. When I decided to move back to Denver in 1978, my father said goodbye and good luck and then suggested that I look up his cousin Mickey and see if he had any leads on jobs in local media. Mickey said he could refer me to KOA noting that they probably had jobs for researchers and reporters. I said no, that newspapers were my trade. He gave me a funny look that said “newspapers are dying, kid – TV is where the action is.” He did send me to talk to an old school chum, the managing editor at the Post, who liked the cut of my jib and brought me on as a high school sports reporter at the paper.

Later, when I was married and had a child, I gave up the newspaper game for the corporate life at Gates Rubber Company where I made the world a better place by telling imaginative tales about automotive and industrial rubber products. My boss’s boss’s boss, Chuck Sonnen, served in the Marines with Mickey. Not sure if he gave me, a Navy ROTC dropout and peacenik, any preferential treatment, but he didn’t fire me. I quit after an illustrious five-year career to pursue the creative writing game. I figured that was where the action was, for me, at least.

I'm not strong on foresight.

Hindsight is my beat.