In search of Maggie Book Riley, my grandmother

I never met her, but I still remember the one photo I saw of her: a young woman, circa 1910, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, serious expression, eyes very much like John's--my father and her son. She was my grandmother, and she disappeared from family life so long before my birth that she may as well have been a remote ancestor. Her name was Margaret (Maggie) Riley, nee Book. Born in 1878, she was no more than 34 when she left her husband and kids, never to be heard from again. I no longer have the photo, but the hat I remember was something like one of these.

Maggie left her home in Kansas City in 1912, when my Dad was only nine. She had three other children, ages 7--13. As my father told the story during my childhood, she came to each of the children, asking them if they wished to leave with her and a male companion or stay with their father. They all elected to stay with their father.

She was only 16 when she married, shockingly young by the standards of my generation and by the same standards, still young when she left. My Dad never blamed her. "She could have drowned me, but she didn't," he used to say before launching into quasi-Dickensonian stories of his life with the uncle and aunt who subsequently took care of them while his father, a carpenter with the railroad, was at work.

I continued to wonder about Maggie from time to time and still do. The basic facts are still unknown: Where did she go? How did she make her life? How and when did she die? Then there are the deeper questions: Why didn't she try to communicate--or did she try and the kids weren't told? Was she happy? Did she make another family or create a different kind of life? What kind of independent life was even possible for her in early 20th century America?

Recently my interest in Maggie's life was rekindled when I got an email from Carol S., with the subject line, "We're cousins!" She had taken a DNA test via Ancestry. com, as did my sister Joan and I, and  our names came up as genetic matches. Carol's great-grandfather, Theodore Book, was Maggie's father. Carol traces her family line back to the family Theodore created with his second wife after Maggie's mom died.

With an intermittent interest in genealogy, my sister Joan and I had already found records from Maggie's early life in rural Missouri, near Odessa. Theodore married Ella Boucher, who died in 1890, at the age of 28 after giving birth to 6 children, including Maggie. Six months after Ella's death, Theodore remarried. Four years later, still just a teenager, Maggie married Hugh Riley. My sister Joan and I speculate that she may have had difficulties with her stepmother or home life in general. Theodore and his new wife, Almedia, went on to have 15 children--for a total of 21 for Theodore. Perhaps there was just no space or peace for Maggie or perhaps she became an unpaid nursemaid to her younger siblings. Or perhaps her father was the problem.  My new cousin Carol's research turned up that Theodore was a "mean" one--so mean that Almedia refused to be buried anywhere near him. (Her children honored the request and put her at the other end of the cemetery.) In any case, Maggie left for a new life.

It could be that the ever-growing database of genealogy tools will help shed light on Maggie's fate. Yet with the huge time gap--more than a century since her disappearance--and the lack of oral or written records, I'm not optimistic. We may well have to settle for remembering her with kindness and compassion, and reminding ourselves that every single advance in women's rights over the past century has been well worth fighting for. Rest in peace, Maggie.