Ancestry Magazine

While searching for an obituary for Frank’s son at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City, I stumbled upon an article in the Wewoka Daily Times Democrat dated Sunday, 11 January 1931. The article was titled “Frank Grall, For 38 Years a Peace Officer, Retires From His Office.”

Our Frank’s life read like an old western movie. When Alfred was appointed marshal of Shawnee, Frank worked as a deputy. There was no jail, so the pair chopped down trees and built Shawnee’s first jailhouse with their own hands.

From the time I filled out my first family tree for a homework assignment in second grade, I knew two things: I was Norwegian, and I liked learning about my family. Fortunately, one of my grandmother’s aunts—Aunt Bertye—was still with us and never ran out of family history to share.

One day when I was 15, I sat down with 94-year-old Aunt Bertye, a box of old photos, and a tape recorder, and I had her identify as many people in the pictures as she could.

My serious efforts to learn more about my Moon ancestry began in 2003, when the company I worked for installed a group of paintings on loan from the New Britain Museum of American Art. Among them was one by a Samuel Moon. My father had often said we had a painter in our family tree, but he had no details about it.
I had looked into our tree once while visiting New York in 1997.

And other family secrets in the daily news.
Decades ago, when I’d ask my mother questions about her grandmother’s brother, I’d get the same answer everytime—Edward Forshay was an actor and his wife was a famous actress.

Sometimes getting past that difficult family history hurdle means enlisting someone other than family.
My grandparents’ farmhouse stood outside North Branch, New Jersey, a village settled by the Dutch. Its thick Dutch-brick walls reputedly hid several walk-in fireplaces. Its hand-fashioned windowpanes offered rippled views of the old water pump and outhouse in the back.

In the Name of Taxes
It all began very innocently one Saturday afternoon sitting at the dining room table with my husband, Dave. We were discussing our bills.

About That Name
I knew my father as Richard Coleman. He met my mother, Helen, in Washington, D.C., around 1946. They married in 1947, and I was born in 1949.
In the mid-1950s, my father became ill with cancer, eventually passing away in Maryland in 1961. As a child, I always wondered where Dad’s family was, especially at the traditional holidays. But my father just wouldn’t talk about it.

Sometimes a ghost taps you on the shoulder and pushes you to help. On a sunny August day, Thomas G. O’Connor’s ghost did just that. He found me at the Portland police museum, pointed to an empty picture frame, and said it was reserved for him.
O’Connor died on 29 August 1867—the first Portland policeman to be killed in the line of duty.

There has always been an air of mystery in my family surrounding the life and death of my great-uncle Phillip James. The second of three brothers who immigrated from war-torn Macedonia to New Albany, Mississippi, around 1910, Phillip was the most personable and fun-loving of the three.

If they weren’t missing, exactly why was this family so hard to find?
They, of course, were not lost. They knew exactly where they had settled, where and whom their children had married, and where eventually they had died. I was the one with the problem—searching for them year after year without finding them.