Like many retirees, Sharon Grimes (B.S. ’71) began using some of her new free time to learn more about her family history. But when she began her new hobby, she discovered her connection to the University goes much deeper than just her own college experience and 31-year career as a U of M communications and public relations professional.

Grimes’ deep dive into her roots started when her partner, Christine Morris, began researching her family history. A former law enforcement investigator, Morris loves following leads and trying to put information together, whether that’s from historical society podcasts, genealogical registries, or her own DNA test.

Last year, Morris also started looking into the Grimes family history. She turned up a few unexpected discoveries, including that Grimes may be related to John Alden, a crewmember on the Mayflower. Another discovery was a relative named Betty Grimes, who was a member of the U.S. Olympic women’s platform diving team in the 1920s. And she found that Grimes is also the great, great granddaughter of Jonathan Taylor Grimes, a pioneering horticulturist and early settler of Edina, Minnesota, who was born in 1818. (Grimes Avenue in Edina is named after him, and his former home is on the National Register of Historic Places.)

“How does that [information] get lost?” Grimes asks, surprised at how even relatively recent stories disappear once all the people who were personally touched by them die.

The couple delved further into Grimes’ genealogy, aided by two family history books written by relatives decades ago and passed down to her. Paging through them, Morris was struck by how many Grimeses had attended the U of M. “I think there are a lot of families that don’t even think about [their long-standing connections to the U of M],” she says. “They remember that Grandma went there, but they don’t put all the pieces together.”

Grimes knew that several family members, including her brother, Gene Dickey (J.D. ’81) and her uncles, Richard, Rodney, and Vernon, went to the U of M. But she wasn’t aware of a more substantial family legacy. Relatives from different branches of the family included Mary Agatha Grimes, who attended the University very early on; she was born in 1863. George Sutherland Grimes graduated in 1881 and went on to become a prominent Minneapolis attorney. Another trailblazer was Jonathan Taylor Grimes’ granddaughter, Marian Grimes (M.D. ’28), one of the state’s earlier female physicians. Alden Reynolds Grimes, Grimes’ grandfather’s cousin, earned a degree in business administration in 1939 and a B.A. in 1940.

The more the couple read, the more U of M grads they discovered.

Some family leads were supplied by Grimes’ cousin, Stacey Grimes (B.S. ’86, M.A. ’06), who has worked for the Humphrey School of Public Affairs since 1990. She helped fill in her side of the family tree, including her father and three brothers, all of whom graduated from the University. Stacey also confirmed information that stretches back to the University’s earliest days, including that Jonathan Taylor Grimes’ daughter, Ella Alma Grimes, married a man named Fred Eustis, a 1877 UMN graduate and younger brother of Warren Clark Eustis, one of the University’s first two graduates in 1873. Ella also attended the University, as did her siblings.

The way that Morris and Grimes mention these long-lost relatives by first names, it’s clear the family history has captured their imaginations. “Christine will tell me something interesting that she finds and ask if I have heard of this person,” says Grimes. “And then I’ll start doing a search and look for obituaries and say, ‘oh, that’s where this person came from.’”

There have been disappointments too. Dead ends. False leads. And unsettling surprises. According to research housed in the St. Louis Park Historical Society, Jonathan Taylor Grimes left Virginia in 1839 because he was a Quaker, and Virginia was a slave state. But several of his relatives stayed and owned plantations.

“[It’s] something to live down,” says Grimes of that distant family connection to slave owners. Grimes was an equal employment opportunity officer when she worked at the University, and in 2010, she used a portion of her proceeds from selling a parcel of wilderness in Northern Minnesota to start the Sharon Grimes Human Rights and Environmental Scholarship in the College of Liberal Arts. This past year, she added a Sharon Grimes Human Rights Fellowship for Master of Human Rights (M.H.R.) students at the Humphrey School.

Both Grimes and Morris know there is still more family to meet, if only in the pages of historical documents.

“The significance of all these people and the things they’ve done because they went to the U of M ... it’s just amazing to me that something can be that impactful,” says Morris.

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