Add up all the factual fragments to build your preferred family history

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." -- Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again" I pull most of the family information I post here from a box of letters and documents sent to me by my sister Molly. She challenged me to discover ways to assemble a family history from the disparate fragments. That's just what I've done, composed fragmented stories from memorabilia fragments. Find examples here, here and here.

Life is composed of fragments. We humans try to make sense of those fragments, infuse them with meaning. Writers try to link fragments into a meaningful whole, meaningful to us and to our readers. It's kind of like that screen blurb on certain movies: "Based on a true story." 

Any family tree tells incomplete stories of a person's life. I took a few from a family tree sketched on what is now a large, tattered sheet of liver-colored construction paper. Someone, and I don't know who, took the time to put down the names and details in what looks like a thin-point Sharpie. Many of these details you won't find on genealogy sites. 

My Grandfather's brother Thomas died on April 1, 1918 at 20, possibly a casualty of the 1918 flu pandemic. He was old enough to be a soldier in the Great War, as were his two older brothers, but no mention is made of that. But he was a "Natural Born Farmer, good with horses."

Grandfather, whom we called Big Danny, was also good with horses as every good cavalry officer should be. We heard the story a hundred times about how Gen. Pershing selected Big Danny's mount to ride while inspecting the troops in France in 1918. 

His brother Bernard  "served on the USS Cassin (Destroyer) WWI." He went to Ft. Lyons Hospital in Colorado Springs from "1920-22 "for a service connected disability." Upon release, he became a salesman. His son Dick was a Navy pilot in WWII who was "shot down, rescued someone, and received Navy medal." 

Big Danny spent time at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver in 1920-21 for a service-connected disability which was said to be pneumonia or possibly TB. Later, he became an insurance salesman.

My great-grandmother Molly, a woman I identified in an earlier post as "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," had a sister Annie who "ran boarding house, did not marry." No dotted lines run below her listing to link her with other names. Since Annie ran a boarding house, I'm sure she had stories to tell. She probably had family stories to tell too. Here's one question I'd like to ask Annie: How did you, sister of "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," end up as the old aunt who runs the boarding house? Thomas Wolfe's mother ran a boarding house in Asheville; Thomas was one of the boarders. He had many stories to tell. He died too soon.

The name Annie resonates with me. My mother was Anna Marie, my mother-in-law Ann Marie, and my daughter, Anne Marie. Anne is derived from Hannah and means "favored, grace."

My great great grandfather, Irish immigrant Thomas O'Shea, father of Michael Francis who married  the beautiful Molly, married Mary Burns and emigrated to the U.S. "about 1860." At some point, he "changed name to Shay." Not sure why he changed the family name. Maybe he was trying to simplify, jettison the O' and simplify spelling to Shay. The Irish were used to the O' and Mc parts of Irish names. Ellis Island personnel should have been, too, as hordes of Irish came over in the late 1840s and early 1850s to escape the potato famine. Maybe he was trying to pass as non-Irish. Admitted to the U.S., he could have trundled right over to Manhattan and landed a job.

Hello, my name is Tom Shay. I'm definitely not Irish so you can immediately give me a position in the executive ranks of your large Anglo-Saxon firm. 

Anybody would buy that line if they could understand what Tom said in his thick brogue and if he wasn't dressed in a cowpie-streaked farmer's overalls, wearing a straw hat, and brandishing a pitchfork. His neck would be red, too, as redneck was slang for all Irish who worked outside under the unfriendly sun. 

Welcome to the firm, Tom. Let me show you our secret handshake. 

Fantasy, of course. He was a farmer in Ireland and he was a farmer in Iowa. And father to eight kids. 

Big Danny (I mentioned him already)), grandson of Thomas and an Iowa City native, returned to his hometown after World War 1. Left to his own devices, he might have joined the ranks of Iowa farmers and Iowa Hawkeye fans. Having a 'hawkeye' means being "particularly observant, especially to small details, or having excellent vision in general." But Big Danny's hawkeye failed to notice a festering lung ailment that took him first to an Iowa army hospital and then to Denver's Fitzsimons. Big Danny married a nurse, got a job, bought a house, raised a family, and lived in Denver for the rest of his long life.

In a photo in front of Big Danny's house, my brother Dan and I wear army uniforms and carry rifles. I am 9 and he is 7. At the end of the year, we would be in a station wagon on our way to Washington state. We returned briefly after a stint in Kansas. We left six months later for Florida. Dan never returned to live in Denver. I did but couldn't stay.

You can't go home again, as it turns out.

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.