Week 1 in 2023’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge from Amy Johnson Crow
I never knew my biological father, Bill. It’s fine with me; I had a father I loved and who loved me, and I didn’t know of Bill’s existence until well into my adult life. Bill died before DNA testing proved that he was indeed my genetic parent. But after decades of doing genealogical research, and conducting a number of DNA investigations since 2010, I am more interested in another mystery. I believe that Bill did not know the identity of at least one of his genetic parents. He was raised by birth certificate parents who were the first-generation children of Finnish immigrants. Their genealogy indicated that they should have been “100%” Finnish, and so Bill should have been “fully” Finnish. But my genetic makeup is not, as it should be, 50% Finnish; instead, I’m only about 25% (ranges from 22% to 27% at several testing sites). This means that Bill’s parents were either both about half-Finnish, or one was not a Finn at all.
By assiduously tracing DNA relatives at five major online sites, I have learned that Bill’s paternal grandmother was a woman named Johanna Alice Toomey, born in Wales to Irish parents in 1857. One of her sons, James Michael McGraw, was Bill’s genetic father. Bill’s mother was either his birth certificate mother or a female relative of hers. (My best hypothesis is that Helen, a niece of Bill’s mother became pregnant out of wedlock and Helen’s childless aunt and uncle, both 38 years old, adopted the baby, Bill, from birth.)
Most of the painstakingly researched story of this part of my background has been done through digital documents and vital records and requires imagination and reconstruction of places and persons. But a photographic portrait of Johanna Toomey McGraw has been shared online by one of her hundreds of descendants, and so I have a more specific image of this ancestor that makes me want to know her. Here’s what I do know.
Johanna came to the U.S. with her parents and sister in 1873 when she was 16. Her parents, Patrick Toomey and Bridget King, had been born in Ireland, but in 1861 after the birth of their daughter Mary they moved to Rhymney, Monmouthshire, Wales, where for the next 10 years or so, Patrick worked in the iron works. A 2008 BBC story on Irish immigration to Wales says that between the 1840s and 1861, the Irish population in Wales grew to 30,000.
Patrick’s history in the iron works may have been the reason the family moved to the forbidding climate of northern Michigan when they arrived in the U.S. In 1877, Johanna married Richard McGrath (pronounced, and also spelled, McGraw) in Kloman, in the upper peninsula. An iron mine had opened in Kloman in 1872. Though she married at 19, Johanna remained close to her parents, and they are found living with her (at the ages of 70 and 65) in Spalding, Michigan (next to Kloman) in 1894.
Johanna’s marriage to Richard McGraw, an Irishman eight years her senior, produced five children: John Joseph, in 1879, Johanna Mary in 1881, James Michael in 1883, Richard Francis in 1885, and Bridget Ellen “Nellie” in 1885. But the marriage may have had its troubles. It is not clear where the young family lived in 1880. In 1894, Richard McGraw died in Grand Traverse, Michigan, a great distance from Spalding, where his family lived. Traverse City was also the home of the Northern Michigan Asylum, whose records are closed, but there is no other family activity in that area. He was buried at home in Kloman.
In 1896, Johanna married a man named John Lodermayer who had been living as a boarder in her Spalding household in 1894. They had two daughters, Elizabeth Teresa in 1895 and Agnes M in 1897. At some point after 1900, John left Michigan. One descendant wrote that there is a family story that he robbed a bank and went out west. Whether or not a bank robbery occurred, he did move to Oregon where he obtained a homestead in 1903 and died single in 1937.
Johanna remained in Michigan, with four children under the age of 15 in 1900. In that census, she said she had given birth to nine children, seven of whom were then living. By 1912, she had moved to the mining country of northern Minnesota, where her address was “68 Monroe Location” in Hibbing. Monroe Location was a new planned community for mine workers. It’s not clear what the impetus was for the move. Perhaps she had moved with John for him to find work, though they appeared separated in the 1900 census. In any event, she remained on the Iron Range, as that part of Minnesota is called, from at least 1912 until her death in St. Louis County, Minnesota, in 1932. At times, she lived with her daughter Agnes, and at times with her own sister Mary and daughter Agnes.
Many genealogists report extraordinary coincidences as they trace the history of their families over decades and centuries, and at least one strange coincidence causes me to want to meet Johanna. I was born in the Detroit area, more than 450 miles from Spalding, more than 75 years after Johanna, my great-grandmother, arrived in Michigan. My family moved across the country in the 1960s and settled in the southwest. But in my late 40s, I moved to Minnesota to marry my second husband (who I’d met in high school out west). Minnesota is a place, I thought, where I have no roots. But almost 20 years after my move here, I found that’s not true: my Irish ancestry all comes from a woman who also moved here probably in her late 40s.
“Johanna,” I’d want to ask, “would you tell me about your life? It looks hard, but you kept going. You had children whose families thrived. I’m only one of your some-120 great-grandchildren, and I haven’t begun to count all the great-great grandchildren or generations beyond that.
“Your portrait is lovely, and what I like best about it is its informality. You are attractive and well-dressed with beautifully groomed hair. Your posture is both upright and comfortable. You gaze not at the camera, but thoughtfully into the middle distance. Was the past important to you? What memories did you cherish? What did you know of your parents’ lives during the Irish famine, and in Wales as immigrants? Was the cold and snow of the northern Midwest daunting to you, or just one more thing to conquer? Did you know your grandchildren? Did you know that your son James had a child outside of his marriage to Mary Ann? What happened to your oldest son John? Did you lose touch with him after he moved to Escanaba? What about your sister Mary who came to be with you after the sad death of her husband in Montana? Were you two always best companions? Which of your own traits would you be most proud to see in your many descendants?”
That would be, I hope, where the conversation would start, if I could meet this great grandmother of mine.
Rootedness 