Ancestry Magazine

I was parked in front of the TV a few nights ago when I received an unexpected phone call from Bob Velke, owner of Wholly Genes. He had a puzzle he suspected (correctly, as it turns out) I wouldn’t be able to resist. After we spoke, he summarized it in an e-mail:

My father-in-law, Thomas F. Reid, was a 26-year-old captain in 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (“The Old Guard”) in Ft. Myer, Virginia on 22 November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As captain of D Company, Tom was assigned the responsibility of organizing all of the details of the interment ceremonies (arranging for the Eternal Flame, the Irish Guard, dignitaries, etc.) at Arlington National Cemetery three days later.

Tom, now 70 years old, has decided to set down his recollections of those four days in writing and to collect testimonials from various surviving officers and ceremonial participants. So far, he’s tracked down about half a dozen of them, including the bugler, handler of the caparisoned horse, a pall bearer, and others.

One of those participants, Sgt. James R. (“Pete”) Holder, contributed an audiotape of his memoirs, including, among other things, a long testimonial about his hero and mentor, Capt. Michael D. Groves, the company commander of Honor Guard Company. Tom wants to track down Groves’s children because he thinks they would appreciate hearing this wonderful testimonial about their dad, a man whose reputation has been otherwise assaulted by attempts to link him to “the JFK conspiracy.”

This is what we know of Michael and his family, largely from obituaries:

Michael D. Groves was born 19 August 1936 in Birmingham (but some say Ann Arbor), Michigan. He went to Birmingham High School and then Eastern Michigan University (1959) as an ROTC honor graduate, entering the service immediately upon graduation. He was said to be a close friend of JFK and occasionally babysat for John Jr.

As company commander of the Honor Guard Company, Groves directed military honors at JFK’s funeral on 25 November 1963. A week later, he died of a sudden heart attack (or some say poison) at the dinner table at his home in Arlington, Virginia.

He was reportedly survived by a daughter, Kelly Ann (3 years old), and his wife, Mary, who at that time was eight months pregnant with another child. Tom believes Mary was about 25 when her husband died and that she later remarried. Capt. “Mike” Groves was also survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Groves of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

So the orphan heirloom in this case was an audio tape with information about a man whose older child had hardly known him and whose younger child had never known him. As an Army brat myself, whose father had also entered the Army out of ROTC in the late 1950s—not to mention, whose family still has the newspaper from the day Kennedy was assassinated—this family felt familiar to me. I wanted to see what I could do.

Where to Start?
Because I spend as much time finding the living as I do finding the dearly departed, I knew this case was far from a slam dunk. Factors such as privacy laws and the mobility of our population can make locating the living more daunting than picking up the trail of a long-departed ancestor.

In this case, we were dealing with a military family, which amplified the difficulty. Where was the soldier’s wife from? Mike and Mary could have met anywhere—he might have been stationed and married in any of a number of places. And if Mary had remarried, what surname might she and her children have wound up with?

I decided to practice one of my own guidelines for such cases—that is, to not obsess on the people I was seeking (Mary, Kelly Ann, and the unknown child), but to find people associated with them and work my way closer.

Bob was smart to provide as much detail as he had because one tidbit caught my eye—the fact that Mike’s parents had lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

In Praise of Cuyahoga County
I’ve worked countless cases across the country, so I often have a sense of which locations are genealogy friendly, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio—where Cleveland Heights is located—is one of them. Since I’m too lazy to memorize or bookmark every single resource I use, I turned to one of my perennial favorites: <www.deathindexes.com>. I selected “Ohio” and then “Cuyahoga County,” and there it was—the Cleveland Necrology Index, hosted by the Cleveland Public Library. I figured that if Mike’s parents were from that area, I might be able to turn up an obituary or two that mentioned them, so I searched “Donald Groves.” I hadn’t expected what popped up:

Source: Plain Dealer; Cleveland Necrology File, Reel 114.
Notes: Heights Army Captain Dies at Fort Myers. A young Army captain who commanded the ceremonial troops at President Kennedy’s funeral collapsed and died while eating dinner at his home at Fort Myers, Virginia, last night. The officer, Capt. Michael D. Groves, 27, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Donald W. Groves, who until last month lived at 2291 S. Overlook Road, Cleveland Heights. They moved to Birmingham, Mich., where Capt. Groves grew up. A sister, Darby, still lives at the Cleveland Heights address. He also is survived by his wife, Mary Frances, and a 3-year-old daughter. He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his sister said.

Where’d They Go?
This was a tremendous discovery to make so early in the search. I now knew that Mike had a sister and that his parents had returned to Birmingham, Michigan, where the soldier had grown up. I was delighted, too, that his sister was named Darby because distinctive names can often be a little easier to trace.

Since Cuyahoga County does have such handy online resources, I played with them for a while, trying to surface any other references to Darby, but no luck. Nor could I find any references to Mike or his parents. Odd. Even though it had been decades ago, I had expected to pick up a snippet or two.

So I decided to shift gears and focus on Birmingham, Michigan. Sure enough, I easily found the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) entry for his father, Donald W. Groves. He had died in 1993, but what about his wife, the soldier’s mother? I turned to a fee-based site, <www.privateeye.com>, to search for Donald because many people continue to be listed for a decade or so after they’ve passed away—especially husbands whose wives keep the phone listed in the deceased’s name. Yes, there was Donald, and since others associated with the same address are also listed, I now knew that Mike’s mother’s name was Gladys. I returned to the SSDI hoping to come up empty, but there she was in 1994. I explored a bit more and <www.findagrave.com> revealed that Donald and Gladys had been buried in Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan, but none of the other Groves in the cemetery were useful for the purposes of this research.

What Happened to Darby?
Sadly, neither of the soldier’s parents was with us any longer, so I turned my attention back to his sister, Darby, but how could I possibly find her? Since the parents had died just slightly more than a decade ago, I tried a variety of online newspaper resources (including ones local to the Birmingham area) but found nothing. This meant it was time to go back to basics.

I pulled up <www.epodunk.com>, entered Birmingham, and scrolled down to “libraries.” A minute later, I left a message with the Adult Services Department of the Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham. Much to my delight, a woman named Susan called back a short while later. I provided details about Mike’s parents, and the following morning Susan faxed me both of their obituaries—the genealogical equivalent of gold. (Note: Always be kind to librarians and overly generous with libraries.)

I read Donald’s first, and though it told me quite a bit about him, the only survivors listed were his wife and three grandchildren. Uh-oh. What about Darby? Why wasn’t she listed? Three grandchildren—so Kelly, Kelly’s unknown sibling, and, presumably, a child of Darby’s.

Okay, time to turn to the obituary for Gladys—ah, she was the mother of the late Michael and Darbea, not Darby.

And Darbea had predeceased her parents. How sad. But the obituary went on to state that Gladys was survived by her mother. This was good news. The obituary listed the names of four of her siblings. And, finally, the names of her grandchildren: Kelly, Kimberly, and Daryl. Almost an ideal obituary.

I reasoned that Kimberly was probably the child born shortly after Mike’s death and that Daryl was Darbea’s son. The obituary also included Darbea’s married name (which I’m excluding here in the interest of privacy), so I decided to search the SSDI for her, but there was no such person. Huh? I turned again to <www.privateeye.com>, this time looking for her son, Daryl—and there, with the others associated with his address, was my answer. Darbea was her middle name. So I returned to the SSDI, entering what I now knew to be her first and last names, and there she was. She died in 1978. Again, I considered how difficult it must have been for Donald and Gladys to lose both of their children so young, Mike at age 27 and Darbea at 37. It made me want to find Kelly and Kimberly all the more.

On a hunch, I returned to <www.findagrave.com> to search for those with Darbea’s surname buried at the same cemetery as her parents. Imagine my reaction when I spotted not only her entry, but Daryl’s. Daryl, it turned out, had died a few years after his grandparents. This not only saddened me but also made me wonder whether I would be able to locate Kelly and Kimberly. If their only aunt, cousin, and their grandparents on their father’s side had all passed away, who would know what happened to them?

Daryl and Gladys Point the Way
I decided to search for an obituary for Daryl and found it at <www.genealogybank.com>. It confirmed that Darbea had been his mother; it also confirmed his father’s name, which I had spotted earlier when searching PrivateEye. So this was one potential contact—the soldier’s brother-inlaw—but given that his wife had died decades ago, would he still be in touch with Kelly and Kimberly?

I turned to the detailed-laden obituary for Gladys. Following up the clues provided, I discovered that her mother had passed away several years later at age 99. GenealogyBank also popped up her obituary, so I was able to backtrack to the family’s 1930 census entry and get an estimated year of birth for each of Gladys’s siblings. I soon discovered that one of them had also subsequently passed away, but with rough birth dates; the others were easy to pinpoint.

I didn’t feel that I should actually call anyone in the family, so I turned the contact information back to Wholly Genes’s Bob Velke and hoped that someone would know something. The next day, Bob reported back that he had talked to everyone whose information I had sent him and a few others. There were a few avid genealogists in the family, so he bounced around from person to person, but in the end it was Mike’s brother-in-law who solved the mystery. Mary had remarried to a Johnson—now how many Mary Johnson’s could there be? “Oh, by the way,” he asked Bob, “Do you want her phone number?” Bob’s response, according to an e-mail he sent relaying the conversation, was, “Pfft, yeah.” A short while later, Bob was talking to the soldier’s remarried widow, who had just returned from dinner with her daughter Kim. The time
from Bob’s initial phone call to me to his talk with Mary?Approximately 48 hours.

Who’s Next?
Do you have an orphan heirloom in need of rescuing? If so, go to <www.honoringourancestors.com>, click on the Submissions menu, and select Orphan Heirlooms. Just fill out the short form and hit the “send” button. Who knows? Maybe yours will be the next success story.