The Girl Widow Unveiled

Deep beneath the roots of a family tree, buried facts about a runaway teenaged marriage, violence, murder, the courts, a months-long newspaper tumult. It started with an innocent hobby night of genealogy, but what prizewinning author David Haward Bain (“Empire Express,” “The Old Iron Road”) discovered that night and over the next feverish days of detective work would change the course of his life, revealing a century-old family secret of his beloved grandmother Rose Donahue Haward. It would quickly take him back to her home ground of Kansas City, Missouri and through many archives, and into the very heart of memory itself.

Secrets Buried Beneath the Family Tree It started with an innocent hobby night of genealogy, but what prizewinning author David Haward Bain discovered that night and over the next feverish days of detective work would change the course of his life, revealing a century-old family secret of his beloved grandmother Rose Donahue Haward. It would quickly take him back to her home ground of Kansas City, Missouri and through many archives, and into the very heart of memory itself. Hidden deep in a hard-won census record was this astounding fact: she had kept a lifelong secret about an unacknowledged first marriage that, as he learned with increasing amazement in a search of official documents and old newspaper clippings, had ended in a loud burst of gunfire on a dark Kansas City street just a day before Christmas Eve, 1908. Rose was arrested for first-degree murder of her husband. She sat before judge and jury in a much-publicized, newspaper-field-day trial – the “Girl Widow Case,” as headlines screamed through the early months of 1909. Miraculously, given the time, as he found, Rose was exonerated in the dramatic trial – for being a victim of domestic abuse in fear of her life, found not guilty by a jury of men (women could not serve on juries and would not even be able to vote for eleven more years). Then she was free to retreat to a quiet life of rebuilding and denial, meeting and marrying his grandfather, bearing their children including Bain’s mother, making possible the author’s very existence and those of his three siblings and all their nine children. His discovery of this secret rocked everyone’s foundation, whether of his siblings or cousins or Rose’s great-grandchildren: how narrow, how miraculous was Rose’s escape. And how equally miraculous was the fate of her family and all the descendents. Moreover, how fortunate was his initial discovery of genealogical pay dirt, just weeks before the 50th anniversary of Rose’s death, and a couple of months before the 100th anniversary of the shooting. The Girl Widow Unveiled is a triumphant story of absorbing detective work. It also features a vivid recreation of events leading up to that Christmastime shooting and its equally dramatic aftermath, based on trial records and jury logs, newspaper accounts, government documents, and ephemera, even down to period trolley and fire insurance maps, all of which contribute to reanimating forgotten times, vanished places -- casting an eerie but truer light on the present.

David Haward Bain was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in Port Washington, New York. He was educated at Boston University and later worked as an editor at several publishing houses before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (NY Times Notable Book; Finalist, LA Times Book Award); The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West; Bitter Waters: America’s Forgotten Naval Mission to the Dead Sea; Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines (Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award); Aftershocks: The Vietnam War Comes Home; The College on the Hill; Whose Woods These Are: The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; and Mighty Good Road: Writings on Railroads, the West, and American History. The Girl Widow Unveiled: Unraveling Dark Secrets in an American Family, a historical memoir, is now published as an ebook. Shorter work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Smithsonian, American Heritage, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, and in many other places, including TV Guide and Glamour. A number of his works, both book-length and long-form nonfiction, are available as e-publications. Bain has taught creative writing and literature at Middlebury College since 1987, and has been affiliated with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in varying capacities since 1980. He has lectured and read at libraries, universities, and bookstores all over North America, including the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Columbia University, the Merchant Marine Academy, and a St. Louis Barnes & Noble where he talked before an audience of one. A co-producer and principal commentator of an American Experience segment, “Transcontinental Railroad,” he has been a frequent commentator in documentaries on The History Channel and a number of public television documentaries. Bain is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.