Cheesy Grits: Here Be Dragons

As I mentioned earlier, my shoofly pie heritage was a commonplace in our family. Every family had a family Bible that charted the family vital records: marriages, births, and deaths. And getting to know someone in that setting meant finding out which branch of which family you were talking to. "Oh, you're Abe's Gid's daughter..." meaning that you were the granddaughter of Abraham and your father was Abraham's son, Gideon.

So, naturally enough, when I met the brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty I would eventually marry, I soon asked her about her family, too. Doesn’t everybody have fragile books, crumbling photos, and batty aunts full of family lore? Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?


My brown-eyed beauty, Jane, knew all about her Wisconsin-born father’s side because her father’s sister, Aunt Eva Ruth, had kept their family books well enough to be considered honorary Amish. But Jane's mother’s side was a mystery. She knew and loved her mother’s father–her grandfather–but knew almost nothing about his life, and in particular his wife–her grandmother. Jane didn't even know her name.

Lieutenant Ronald Godfrey and his new bride
Audrey Ralston Godfrey. Taken in Norfolk,
with "April 8, 1944" handwritten on it so we
assume it is their wedding picture.

During World War II, Jane’s mother Audrey had met a handsome young Navy lieutenant named Ron Godfrey at an Officers’ Club dance in New York City. A Wisconsin native, Ron was serving aboard an infantry landing craft designated LCI(L)550 that was being fitted for duty in the Pacific. When he had a brief shore leave at the Norfolk (VA) Navy Yard, Audrey took a bus from New York to Norfolk and there they were married. The new bride came back to Huntington, Long Island, for the rest of the war while her new husband shipped out to the Pacific, where he saw active duty around Palau. When Ron returned home at the end of the war, he and Audrey moved to Southport, Connecticut, where he started working as an engineer with General Electric in Trumbull. And it was there that they had three children, the youngest being Jane.

Jane knew one of her two aunts on her mother’s side, but the family wasn’t at all close, so there wasn’t a lot of contact. One aunt had never married and had remained in the East, but relations with her were not good. The other and less-known aunt had married a Minnesotan named Greenlaw and moved from New York City to Detroit Lakes, MN, where she died in 1954 from the complications of diabetes.

Aside from Jane’s remaining aunt and her grandfather, the rest of her mother’s family was a complete mystery. And her mother had told mysterious and tantalizing stories about her own origins: sometimes her ancestral family was named Mendoza, sometimes they were from Chile and sometimes from Argentina. Maybe New Orleans was in the mix, too: the tale floated and circled without ever quite touching the ground.

Indeed, it was a tale so mysterious that it apparently dare not be told: soon after I met Jane, she went to see her parents, who now lived in California near her brother and his family, and she asked her mother about her grandmother. To Jane’s shock and dismay, her mother dissolved into tears. “I don’t remember ever seeing my mother cry before,” she told me when she got back.

As Aristotle writes, “All men by nature want to know," and that certainly includes me. But it was clear to us now that the map of Jane’s mother’s family was like one of those imagined medieval maps on which the unknown world was a fearful and terrible mystery marked by “Here Be Dragons.”

And thus began a trek that has occupied me for more than the last quarter of a century, although I didn’t do much for many years precisely because I didn’t want to add to the pain that was clearly already there. But, being nevertheless a son of Aristotle the Stagirite as well as a son of Jacob Hertzler, the Amish bishop, I couldn’t resist looking.