MY MYSTERY GRANDMOTHER

My paternal grandparents--date unknown, probably about 1913

I’m seeing way too many ads these days that encourage you to spit in a tube, then send it (with the required payment) to a place that promises to detail your ancestral DNA.  You just may be surprised to learn where your relatives came from. I have no need to do that, thanks to my mother. The oldest of nine, she had many warm and sprawling connections among her Norwegian kin. She loved digging into her genealogy and left many charts, photos, and stories behind when she died.

That wasn’t true of my dad, born in Missoula, Montana, into a family with roots in various parts of Germany.  His dad was a railroad engineer out of Missoula who somehow met and fell in love with a young lady who taught in Phillipsburg, about eighty miles away.  She had the delightful first name of “Alvina," meaning "noble friend.” I have this undated copy of a newspaper clipping about their marriage:

Miss Mohr is one of the best-known and most highly respected young ladies of Phliipsburg.  Mr. Doering, who is a railway locomotive fireman [and then it named his employers]. The happy couple left on their bridal trip to Seattle, to return later and make their home in Missoula.

It’s possible the photo above is their wedding photo, though I can’t confirm that. I know I see some of her delicate features in my daughter. Sadly, Alvina didn’t live to see her children grow up. She died when my dad was about 12, his brother, 10, and a sister, 7.  I often wonder if her cause of death was pneumonia, so deadly in those pre-antibiotic days. Needing someone to care for his home and children, my grandfather quickly married a single woman who’d immigrated from Austria, and who was a railroad cook. She was of a different faith, and apparently there was strife in the home.

Germans are famed for being tight-lipped, and this was especially true of dad, who never spoke to us of his childhood.  For whatever reasons, the second marriage estranged the children, and my dad moved away from his roots as soon as he graduated from college.  But this one old photo of his “first mom” was among his treasures.

I’ve learned that I must hold lightly onto some of life’s mysteries.  I may never know the rest of the story of “Grandma Alvina.” A couple weeks ago I survived my second bout of pneumonia, thanks to the medicines she had no access to. And I will come to another “Mother’s Day” blessed to hold the children of my children in my lap.

I’m sad that my dad apparently missed out on a full childhood of nurturing love. But he didn’t let that cobble the rest of his life. He was known among the family and the community as a giving, caring man.  Those are the attributes of a Christ-shaped life--one belonging to the family of God--that no DNA test can predict.