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.

Family Lore: in May 1915, Martin Hett waits in Liverpool for a British ship that isn't sunk by U-boats

My sister Molly sent me a packet of family letters and documents a few months ago and asked me to make sense of them, see if they came together in a story we could print for family consumption.

I finally read through them all and placed them neatly in a box. They sat in the box with me pondering the contents. I wasn't sure what to do next.

I decided to liberate one batch of papers from the box every day and post about it on my blog. That's the best I could do. 

This is a page about the early history of Martin James Hett, my maternal grandfather.  

Born July 14, 1899 in County Roscommon, Ireland. His mom (maiden name Nora McWalters) died at the birth of her fifth baby in 1900. Martin was 15 months old; Nora was buried in Galway. Widower Thomas Hett remarried to Delia Byrne; they had 11 children. Thomas, whose nickname was Bob, was born in village of Kiltobar, County of Roscommon. He died in 1932 and is buried in County Mayo. He farmed 15 acres and raised cows, chickens, ducks, sheep, and had one mule. Grew potatoes and tended a vegetable garden.

It rained a lot.

The family lived in a thatched-roof house (we have photos). Four rooms, flagstone floor. Cooked and heated with peat (turf) in large cast-iron pots hung from a hook. When Martin was eight years old, he worked for neighbors at six pence a day. He walked barefoot one mile to a school that had segregated classrooms for girls and boys. He allegedly left home voluntarily at 14. In family lore, Martin was 12 when kicked out by his evil stepmother and told to fend for himself. 

He went to Manchester, England, and found work in a coal mine. He worked two miles underground and was paid six shillings a day which was worth approximately $1.50 USD. 

He saved enough money to buy a steerage ticket to America out of Liverpool for $59. He first booked on the Lusitania which didn't arrive at port due to being sunk by a German submarine. He then booked on the Transylvania that was sunk by another U-boat. He finally got on the Cameronia and sailed to New York City in nine days, without incident. Went through Ellis Island and was released into the wild in America. What happened next will have to wait until we dig out the follow-up paperwork.

Editor's Notes

The Cameronia was a feisty little vessel. While sailing into the Mersey River on its return voyage in June 1915, it was attacked by a U-boat. The ship's captain tried to ram the German vessel which dove beneath the waves and broke off the attack. Two years later, the Cameronia was a British troopship headed to Alexandria, Egypt, when it was torpedoed. The ship sank in 40 minutes with 210 souls lost. More than 2,000 soldiers made it to the lifeboats and were saved. 

Home of the free, land of the brave, and graveyard of forgotten pasts

Genealogy once was the province of  retirees, Mormons, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Young people didn't care because, well, they are young people. Mormons cared because their salvation and that of their ancestors depended on it. The DAR just wanted to know whom to accept and whom to snub.

DNA tests have contributed to this change. People find out that they have 20 percent Sub-Saharan Africa in their genome even though they have red hair and freckles and get plastered every St. Patrick's Day. It's a revelation. They begin to ask who these ancestors were and head to ancestry.com to trace their lineage. Some lines are easy to trace. They left behind birth/death records, census entries, military service. Facts can be found. We fill in the chart and show it off to our families who care more about their NCAA tournament brackets than they do about Grandpa's service in World War One. The PBS show, "Who Do You Think You Are?, takes this a step further. Celebs want to trace their roots and ancestry.com supplies the trained genealogists, researchers and librarians who find out that their ancestors include the first king of England. Their story also comes with a slice of humble pie. I may be related to a king, but I also am the offspring of indentured servants, slave-holders and convicts. Therein lie the compelling stories, but you only have so much time in a one-hour show. We may discover our fourth great grandfather's name but it takes newspaper clippings and other docs to find at least a germ of their life's stories.

The searchers are left with their imaginations.

This is the province of  fiction writers.We can take an obscure fact and twist it into a 300-page novel., We find one of those boxes on the ancestry.com web site, fill in our knowledge with a few facts, and then let 'er rip. On the show, celebs confronted with the fact of an ancestor''s checkered past wants to know who what when where why and how. The trail of historical documents dries up and they are left with their imagination which often is lacking.

The most commonly asked questions on this show is: "How come I didn't know any of this?" In America, we forget our pasts. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave and the graveyard of forgotten pasts. Our ancestors were interesting but not interesting enough to be remembered.

I am writing a novel about my grandparents' era, post-World War I Colorado. Two war veterans, one Irish immigrant, and one budding suffragist from rural Ohio. These four people have been gone for decades. I grew up with them but my children never knew them and are not particularly interested in their stories. Their grandchildren will never know me and not care about my stories. I find this exceptionally sad. "Who Do You Think You Are" often closes with a visit to an ancestor's grace. The burial sites are sometimes in fine shape. Often they are neglected,weedy and overgrown, or just impossible to find. It's easy to spit out a cliche: their burial sites may be neglected, but their stories will live forever.

No they won't. Mine won't. Yours won't. People will forget. We forget quicker in the USA than anywhere else on the planet. The inexorable onrush of capitalist culture depends on it. To change that attitude only leads to grief.

Or to fiction. I am writing about my grandparents' era. They were young. They moved across the country into what they thought were promising futures. My goal is to capture that time. It didn't turn out as hoped. I know some of those stories too. But to be young and a pioneer. Such a delicious time, and fraught with peril.

It's their story but not their story. More a feeling of what it felt like to be them in a certain time and place.

All told from the POV of a this soon-to-be-forgotten entity.

Meanwhile, in Liverpool, my grandfather awaits the Lusitania

In "Dead Wake," Erik Larson tells the story of the last Atlantic crossing of the R.M.S. Lusitania, Larson is a fantastic storyteller and I should have known better than to start reading his latest book before bedtime. Two hours later, I was deep into the tale but had to get some shut-eye. Tomorrow's another day....

Larson's "Isaac's Storm" was my first contact with the writer. As always, he takes a defining historic event, this time the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane, and takes it down to sea level, seeing the cataclysm through the eyes of local meteorologist Isaac Cline.

Wasn't that a mighty storm
Wasn't that a mighty storm in the mornin'
Wasn't that a mighty storm
It blew all the people away.

Larson has a novelist's eye for detail and characterization. We all want to hear other people's stories. When we tell stories, we always tell it from a person's P.O.V. What did you do in the way, daddy? How did you two meet? Who are you named after?

How did you get to the U.S., Grandpa?

My maternal grandfather, Martin Hett, waited in Liverpool for the Lusitania to dock on May 7, 1915. Martin,. 14, held a steerage ticket for New York. One way. For the past two years, Martin had worked in the coal mines of northern England. In 1912, he left the poverty of County Roscommon in Ireland to make his own way in the world. His ultimate destination was the United States, home to an older brother and sister who earlier had fled Ireland.

Martin was not a gregarious Irishman. Gruff and hard-working, he didn't spend a lot of time telling tales. His Lusitania tale was a short one. He waited for the Lusitania to arrive in Liverpool. Pieces of it arrived, the flotsam and jetsam left after a German U-boat attack. He rescheduled his ticket for the next ship to New York. The Germans sunk that one, too. The third time was a charm.

That's it. No florid touches. No grandiose descriptions. He made it to New York and then to Chicago, where his brother got him a job working downtown's elevated trains.

As a trained reporter and researcher, I could easily trace Martin's story. And I will, one of these days. It's a fine story as is. It's as good as my paternal grandfather's story about General Pershing riding his Iowa National Guard cavalry mount during a break in the action during World War I. It's as good as my maternal grandmother's claim to have served as the first postmistress of a PO in small-town Ohio. It stacks up against my Maryland-raised paternal grandmother's claim that her mother's family was kin to Robert E. Lee of the Virginia Lees. All of these claims can be tested. That's what the Internet is for. DNA tests, too.

I'm also a fiction writer. I make stuff up. Sometimes I begin with the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's a situation or a snippet of conversation. It might be an old memory. It might be someone else's memory. I am blessed and/or cursed with wonderful recall. Thing is, when I tell a story at a family gathering, other family members remember the same situation differently. Memory plays tricks on us. Writers need fact checks if they are writing non-fiction. If writing fiction, we still need to make sure that we have the names and dates right. The Lusitania was sunk on such a day and such a time. As for the reasons why, we still have writers speculating 100 years later. And why is that? The sinking of the Lusitania is one of the reasons given for the U.S. entry into the European war two years later.

The more history I read, the less I understand. I love the stories, as does Larson. One incident leads to another. The Lusitania, the fastest ship in the Cunard Line inventory, the greyhound of the Atlantic, races toward Liverpool. Unterseeboot-20 awaits. The German submarine is captained by Walther Schweiger, his surname the same as my wife's maiden name. "No relation," she says. "How do you know?" I reply. She shrugs. Her German relatives were simple farm folk who immigrated to the U.S. before World War I. Capt. Schweiger was a well-to-do city boy from Berlin, "No relation," she said.

My grandfather must have been wrapping up his job in the mines, ready to head to America. At 14, a veteran coal miner. Imagine that. What were you doing at 14? At 14, I graduated from Catholic grade school which, in those days, was eighth grade. My only job up to that point was paperboy. I had never seen the inside or the outside of a coal mine.

Martin Hett had already left his home country of Ireland. He now was leaving his adopted country to travel to America. His adopted country was at war, as he would discover dramatically in Liverpool. That was 100 years ago next month.

Larson illustrates his tale of the Lusitania with portraits of the ship's captain and crew, and a variety if passengers. He imagines life in a crowded and dangerous submarine. He doesn't mention my grandfather awaiting the big ship to dock and take on new passengers. That's up to me, of course.

It's all in the story.

St. Patrick's Day -- a look back

On the road to the Black Hills this St. Patrick's Day. Too preoccupied with the upcoming St. Patrick's Day Pub Crawl in Deadwood to write anything original. So I'll leave my readers with this St. Patrick's Day column from 2011. It covers a lot of Irish genealogical history: Potato Famine, Irish Diaspora, excessive drinking, superiority of Irish literature, Catholicism, etc. Read it here.