Henry's Story

Henry Joseph McGraw was my great-grandfather.  Sadly, I have no pictures of him...just shared family stories.  

He was born about 1880 presumably in Ohio of Irish descent.  He was a railroad man with ties to Cleveland.  He worked the Cleveland to Cincinnati (3C) line which had a stop in Delaware.

In Delaware, he met my great-grandmother, Mary Rowan.  They married there and had 2 children, George and Eleanor, my grandmother. 

Railroad work brought the family to Columbus, Ohio.  They first lived in Flytown, later East Columbus, and then Clintonville.

Before dementia robbed my grandmother of her memories, she shared stories of her parents, Papa and DeeDee:

• Henry had been in the military
• Henry had a brother/relative named George in Cleveland (my grandmother as a teenager would visit and stay with his daughters)
• Henry was injured on the job
• Mary died young from routine surgery leaving a void in the family
• Henry, later in life, would wander the streets of the Short North, and had to be committed

As a child who had not yet been infected with the genealogy bug, the most intriguing story was something her father told her and she also passed on...he thought he was not the son of his parents but the son of an older sister raised by her parents.

So began my decades long search of Henry's story.