From a kind of round-robin email to family:
Hello, all!
The SLO Railroad Museum just emailed me to let me know of the upcoming funeral of a local man, 93, who was one of the last steam engine engineers. (Elizabeth and I took a ride on one to the Isle of Skye, and it was just like a Harry Potter movie.)
That set me a-pondering. Wasn’t there an ancestor who was a train engineer?
Yup. Our Great Uncle William “Willie” Keefe, born in the Pennsylvania oilfields to Thomas and Margaret Keefe. He was #1 in the batch of ten that would include our grandfather, at #9.
I found his photo, not a good one:
And I discovered that he was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway, whose route(s) ran thusly (it went out of business about 1970):
So there’s a chance some of Elizabeth’s Washington ancestors might’ve been passengers on Great Uncle Willie’s train.
There was no date of death for him on ancestry.com, so I did some hunting. After about 25 minutes, from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:*
So, sadly, he died on the job. He died on Monday, May 10, 1948–only three days before Bruce Keefe Gregory was born.
Then I looked up his train. It wasn’t diesel, not steam, but it was gorgeous.
*More Minnesota trivia: The 1862 Sioux uprising began in Meeker County, where Thomas and Margaret would later homestead and where most of the bunch o’ Keefes were born. I bring that up because John Rice, an Arroyo Grande settler whose house still stands in an old, old part of AG [photo below], was part of a regiment charged with ensuring order and witnessing the execution of 38 Sioux warriors in Mankato, Minnesota in December 1862.
So it goes. That is today’s report from The History Desk.
Great Uncle Willie’s home in Minneapolis–the little fellow with the yellow door.
A Work in Progress 