Rest in Peace, Anna.

One-hundred years after the death of Anna E. Riley (nee Nix) and I finally have the closure denied to my father. Anna at long last has a tombstone, and I finally know what happened to her baby daughter, Grace E. Riley.

My father never knew more than myths and rumors about his mother. He could not talk about her to his family and from childhood built a myth around the little information that he had.  He knew that she was murdered by a lover who then killed himself. That much was accurate, but in my father’s myth, his mother was a Cherokee princess killed by a brave to whom she had been promised in marriage after she married my grandfather instead.

Anna was not Cherokee. She was of Irish descent, and then there is the ‘princess’ part. How is it that all white people of his generation who had Indian heritage insisted that his native American ancestor was a chief or a princess? At any rate, nineteen-year-old Anna was killed by a man much her senior who was enamored of her. She may or may not have committed adultery with him. She met him at the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati in February 1918 and told him that she would not leave behind her family to be with him. Overwhelmed with grief, he killed her, wrote a seven-page suicide letter explaining all of this, then killed himself. In the hotel room with them was Anna’s eight-month-old daughter, Grace Riley.

After Anna’s death, my grandfather, Wilford, and his three-year-old son, Henry (my father), moved in with Wilford’s parents. Baby Grace was immediately placed in one of several children’s homes in Cincinnati. After that, she disappeared. No trace of Grace appeared in any of my genealogy searches. I never knew what happened to her.  I always mourned her. How could her family care so little about her?  Neither Anna nor Wilford’s parents were willing (or able?) to take her in. What kind of people voluntarily relinquished their child, their grandchild?

One hundred years later, I finally learned what happened to Grace. She was adopted by a couple that according to the account of one of her daughters, loved, even ‘doted’ on her. (Out of respect to her family’s right to privacy, I will not use their surnames.) Grace was renamed Kalya. She had a happy childhood, grew up, married and had five children of her own.  I am so happy to know that she was dearly loved by her parents and her children and I no longer pity her. Through adoption, she escaped the lies and the secrets that shaped my father who grew up feeling a deep sense of shame and inadequacy.

While some of the shame was of his own making, I do not doubt that my father’s family played a role in his sense of inadequacy. Henry became Harry, and he left his family at the age of sixteen. He assumed Grace Riley’s birthdate which made him old enough to join the Army without parental consent. That is why he had two birthdates in his military records. His correct date of birth was not a part of his military records until he had to receive a top-secret security clearance from the Army for his role in the Nurnberg trials. My father divorced himself from his family so completely that he told me that he had no living relatives, no aunts, cousins or uncles. That too was a lie. After my father died, I learned that his aunts lived just a few blocks from us when we lived in Newport, Kentucky 1961-1962.

Grace, a/k/a Kalya escaped whatever drove Harry’s demons. I am happy for her and her children. They grew up feeling loved and cherished. They likely did not experience physical or sexual abuse or have their family torn apart by alcoholism. I inherited enough of my father’s shame that I don’t want them to know what it was like to grow up in Harry’s household. His inadequacies colored all of his children’s lives. It is enough for me to know that Grace escaped that family history and experienced something better. Bless her and her descendants!

The final part, and that which with I started this. Anna Riley was buried without a tombstone or anything to mark her life or her passing. Her affair made her an anathema to my father’s family, and my father never knew where his mother was buried. It took some searching for me to learn where. I tried to visit her grave last year, but there was no stone, and even the plot marker was deeply buried beneath the soil and grass. This year, I bought her a headstone. Anna deserves this much. Through her son and her daughter, she is the ancestor of two completely different families tied together only through her DNA. I cannot despise my grandmother for her possible infidelities. By the time that she died, she had lost two children and knew nothing except poverty and want. What nineteen-year-old does not wish for more? In the end, she chose her family and died for that decision. Rest in peace, Anna. Your life was not in vain.