Revisiting the story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker
When Call Me a Bastard was published in 2024, there were still some outstanding questions, now there are some answers
As our month-long celebration comes to a close, I want to thank each and every one of you again for all the love and support I’ve received here over the last year. Your recommendations, likes, comments, shares and restacks are greatly appreciated — so feel free to keep them coming!
Anyway, without further ado, here’s the final look-back of this month. Enjoy, and I look forward to your thoughts in the comments.
Call Me a Bastard, the remarkable true story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker, was spun out over the course of 20 weeks in 2024, and, although I’d been working on the project for nearly four years by then, there were still some gaps.
I believed at the time some of those questions simply couldn’t be answered, and, sadly, so far that’s been the case, although my research continues.
But, a few gaps have been filled, and in the most unexpected way!
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t already read Call Me a Bastard, now might be a good time to go back and do that before reading any further.
Release Date: July 1, 2025
An unexpected connection
In early January 2025, I opened my personal email and found a message from an unknown sender. How it didn’t end up in the junk file is beyond me, but there it was.
The message was short and mysterious: “Can you give me a call?” and an Oklahoma number.
My first thought was how much I hate entities that sell email addresses. I mean seriously, there’s a special place in hell for them, right?
But then I remembered my husband still has a lot of family in Oklahoma, and, over the years, I’ve probably sent out a dozen or more requests for family history information from them.
Maybe someone had found something worth sharing!
I clicked reply and sent any equally short note: “What’s up?”
A few minutes. later, a new message appeared.
“I’m Robin Morecroft, Aimee Henry’s grandson.”
You could have pushed me over with a feather.
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A grandson looking for answers
Robin Morecroft’s father, John Harold Morecroft, JR, made sure his son grew up hearing stories about his grandfather, John SR, even though the man everyone called “The Professor” had died twenty years before Robin’s 1954 birth.
As a boy, John JR had spent nearly all his time with The Professor, often accompanying him to conferences and lectures where he’d be recruited to run the lantern slide projector, and later, helping with the bee hives and orchards his father maintained.
Robin knew his grandfather had been a big deal professor at Columbia University back in New York, and he’d memorized the details about the critical role John SR had played in defeating the Nazis — not as a soldier on the front lines, but as a scientist, an electrical engineer and pioneer of the radio technology which would one day lead to sonar and radar devices used by submarine captains and fighter pilots.
The tales his father shared about The Professor were the stuff of legends, and more than once, Robin wished he’d had the chance to meet the man in person, to hear the stories first-hand, to ask questions.
Despite knowing so much about his grandfather, Robin knew next to nothing about his grandmother.
Not that he hadn’t asked, because he had. But the answer was always the same: She’d died in childbirth, and her name had been Aimee Henry Morecroft.
Robin’s father refused to talk about his mother, and, although the Morecroft home was filled with family photos and keepsakes, Robin quickly realized memories of his grandmother were nowhere to be found.
And somehow, that bothered him more than it should.
When his friends talked about spending time with their grandparents, Robin just nodded, then quietly cried himself to sleep later, feeling the sharp loss of connection and belonging in his bones.
At ten, he and his mom, Ann, traveled to New York to experience the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. Afterward, they took a side trip north to Syracuse, NY, where John Sr had grown up and where several of the older Morecroft family members still lived.
The family stories told — and the wall of silence around the Professor’s first wife — only deepened Robin’s sense of loss.
As he got older, Robin began hearing more stories about his father’s early life: the difficult relationships he’d had with his stepmother and her son; the Christmas breaks he’d endured alone and miserable at the boarding school his father had sent him to to appease his new, young wife; the betrayal he’d felt when his stepmother kicked him out of the family home shortly after his father’s death. The longing to know who he was and where he belonged that followed.
And those stories, too, broke Robin’s heart.
Shortly after John Jr. passed away in December 1984, Robin received some shocking news from his mother: During their visit to Syracuse twenty years earlier, members of the Morecroft family had told her that John’s mother, Aimee, hadn’t died in childbirth.
She’d just been dead to him.
From his stepmom, Robin later learned his grandparents had been involved in a scandalous divorce and custody battle when John was a teenager. Forced to choose between his mother and father, he’d chosen the latter, cutting off all connection with the former.
He and his father had left New Jersey for California shortly after, putting 2,800 miles and nearly an entire continent between themselves and those bitter memories, and at some point, telling people his mother had died had just become easier for John than telling the truth.
The revelation was, Robin remembers, a body blow.
He’d later learn Aimee — the grandmother over whose absence he’d shed so many tears — had been alive for the first 27 years of life.
That news, Robin recalls, was even harder, yet it somehow made sense of the loss he’d felt growing up — the empty place where his grandmother should have been.
Robin spent the grief-filled weeks and months after his father’s death visiting courthouses, sending out record requests, scrolling newspaper archives and seeking answers from family members and others who might have known his father and grandfather, and the secrets they’d kept.
Knowing who he was and where he belonged had become his obsession.
In July 1985, Robin pulled together everything he’s discovered about his Morecroft family and spelled it out in a 15-page dot matrix-printed letter to his infant son. When the time came, Robin wanted to make sure the boy would know who he was.
History would not be repeated.
Over the next four decades, Robin dipped back into family history as life allowed, but the obsession had mostly cooled. The empty place had been filled.
He’d found his people.
Among the scores of ancestors going back several generations, Robin could count a grandmother named Aimee Henry Morecroft, a Boston Brahmin named Mary Martha Parker and Allen Thorndyke Rice, the US Ambassador to Russia, and that was good enough.
Then one day in January 2025, Robin felt the tug. He still had questions about his grandmother, Aimee, so put her name into the search bar and hit return.
His screen, he remembers, was suddenly filled with images and links to a Substack newsletter called The Lost & Found Story Box and a story about Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker — his grandmother and great-grandmother.
Robin didn’t recognize the author’s name, but he did find an email address. He had questions. A lot of them.
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A writer’s responsibility
I never want to lose sight of the fact that I’m writing about real people. The weight of that responsibility is ever-present and, in many ways, foundational to the way I research and tell the stories I share here at The Lost & Found Story Box and elsewhere.
So, when I got that second email from Robin, I did a quick gut check before responding.
My research was solid. I’d stuck to the facts, and had clearly framed everything else as just that — best guess efforts based on three year’s of living with the intricacies and nuances of the story itself and the people involved.
I’d worried over every plotting decision, making sure it didn’t lead the reader down a path that facts didn’t support, and continuously went back to my research notes and sources to stay on track when my imagination tried to intervene.
I’d done the work, and had confidence in the story..
Satisfied, I dialed Robin’s number.
That first call was admittedly awkward, but it set a solid foundation for dozens of later conversations in which Robin and I worked together to sift fact from fiction, create realistic family timelines and provide context for memories and bits and pieces of information he’d collected over the years.
We shared documents, research findings and notes, had long discussions about inconsistencies in the records and what they might mean, and brainstormed future areas to explore.
I did my best to answer every question Robin posed. And he generously did the same for me.
Our conversations continue.
Getting to know Aimee a little better
The relationship between a son and his parents
Many of the missing pieces Robin was able to provide in terms of Call Me a Bastard spoke to the relationship between Aimee and her son, John. JR, after the divorce and custody battle in 1928.
As a reminder, the final settlement reached by Justice Frankenthaler granted Aimee partial custody of John JR and ordered John SR to pay her $200 a month in alimony.
In practice, however, a markedly different arrangement was made.
Fourteen-year-old John JR was at summer camp in Connecticut when the judge called him into his chambers in 1928 and made his promise to treat his mother, Aimee, with respect. That fall, he started attending a prestigious private boarding school in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1931. When not at school, John JR lived with his father and stepmother in New Jersey, however, family stories suggest Marion had already driven a wedge between father and son, and John JR spent most of his time at school, including holiday breaks.
Sometime in 1930, John Sr, Marion and her 12-year-old son moved to California, and 16-year-old John JR moved with them. Robin recalls his father saying he was reluctant to get a CA drivers license when they moved because he already had one from NY, which suggests the family still had ties to their former home. Whether the family traveled between the two locations is unclear, but John SR was still listed as a professor at Columbia during these years.
When John JR was 19, his father passed away. Almost immediately, Marion threw him out of the family home and cut him off financially, forcing him to quit college. Even then, there’s no indication John JR turned to his mother, Aimee, for support even though her whereabouts would likely have been known to him.
Fast forward ten years to Mary Martha’s death in 1943. As the fight over her fortune got under way, John JR was among those members named in various lawsuits, some of which did not get resolved for a decade or more. How he fared in those efforts is unknown.
Twelve years later, Robin was born, and as he grew up, his father repeatedly told him that his grandmother, Aimee Henry Morecroft, had died in childbirth.
In truth, she was very much alive and, by that time, living outside of Washington, DC.
When John JR passed away, Robin learned the truth about his grandmother, but sadly, it was too late. She’d passed away three years earlier.
The gift that just keeps giving
Shortly after she and Frank married in 1936, Aimee submitted paperwork to allow her to work for the US Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) alongside her husband. That paperwork required a birth certificate/proof of birth, something Aimee didn’t have and would never have thanks to Mary Martha. Somehow, she was able to convince the OIA that she had a birth certificate, just not with her, and they accepted her paperwork. For the next eight years, the OIA routinely sent Aimee, and later her supervisors, reminders that her paperwork was incomplete, and she needed to submit a birth certificate or lose her job.
The undeniable presence of Brahmin blue blood
At several of their posts, Aimee and Frank were the only non-natives permanent residents and US representatives in the village, meaning they wore a number of different hats. Frank was a school teacher, community worker and even the supervisor of the reindeer herds at various times. And Aimee was responsible for supporting local women and children, assisting Frank in the classroom and even hosting visiting officials.
It was in that last position that Aimee apparently had some issues.
In the early spring of 1940, Aimee was tasked with looking after someone named Miss King, and, upon returning to her office, the visitor sent a formal letter of complaint to a Mr. Hirst at OIA headquarters: Aimee Mishou, she claimed, was rude, inconsiderate, incompetent, inefficient and over paid.
When Aimee received Mr. Hirst’s letter of reprimand, she took great exception and fired off a letter of her own:
Dr. Mr. Hirst;
Miss King doesn’t feel I earn forty dollars a month.
Any person so inefficient they take three-quarters of an hour to clothe their body (she presumably has had for sixty or seventy years) can hardly teach me efficiency.
Any creature who leaves their commode or chamber pot for the hostess to empty has no self-respect.
Anyone who cannot eat this or drink that and picks at the food provided surely is not well enough to be out in the Field.
After the big evening meal, any well-bred person, a guest in the house, at least goes through the form of asking, “May I help?”
I find I cannot take orders from any one so inefficient, lacking self-respect, sick, ill-bred and lacking in social intelligence as Miss King. 1
That brick wall that won’t budge
Sadly, my search for more information on Mary Martha’s first illegitimate daughter, Martha Sylvester, hasn’t gone anywhere. I’ve been working with a genealogist in Austria who continues to track down leads, but no luck yet. And, there are some recently located declassified US government records I hope to get access to in the next few months that look promising.
If anything pops up, I’ll let you know!
And that’s a Wrap
I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Robin for allowing me into his life and sharing his stories and research with me. It has been an honor, and one I do not take lightly.
And to my readers, thanks so much for all your comments and support as I’ve looked back on this first year here at The Lost & Found Story Box! If you have any comments or questions, please drop them in the comments. Thanks!
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Have you read the incredible true story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker? Call Me a Bastard is my longest serialized story to-date, and the one that started it all here on the Lost & Found Story Box. Check out the story from the beginning.
And in case you missed it, here’s a link to my most popular short series to-date, The Incorrigible John George. I hope you’ll agree that “incorrigible” is the best way to describe this old scoundrel!
End Notes
1 Private research of Robin Morecroft shared with the author.
What an exciting experience for you! I loved reading about Aimee again.
That is phenomenal! And he was looking at just the time that you were writing...you can't make this stuff up. This will make a lovely movie someday...a dual timeline one...who do you want to play you in the movie?