Beall

In her diaries, my great-grandmother often speaks of her friend Anna Beall from Pasadena, Calif. Anna and her husband, Granville 'Grant' Edsell Beall, seem to have moved to California from Ohio at about the same time that my great-grandparents did, perhaps even earlier. However, according to military records it appears that in 1898 Mr. "Grant" Beall was a 21-year-old private fighting in the Spanish-American War. A quick Google shows that Mr. "Grant" Beall was actually white, not black, and he was also not the only Beall soldier fighting in that war. Beyond that I really can't say much about that. I have not studied the Spanish-American War very much and am only vaguely aware of it. It seems that Grant Beall, originally from Greene County in Ohio, also spent some time in Tahiti in the 1920s, according to ship passenger records of him having sailed at least twice to and from Tahiti and San Francisco. What was Grant doing in Tahiti? The answer is not clear. I have no other clue so don't ask me. And why was Grant Beall admitted to a mental hospital in 1926, at age 50, with a diagnosis of manic depressive and psychosis? I just have no clue about that either. He died in 1944 at age 68 so obviously we never met. I never knew this person existed and anyway he is not even related to us, just the husband of a friend of my great-grandparents, so I can't say much about it. There is no real connection there. We have no idea what happened to their daughter Miriam and her family after they moved to Northern California. Life is too short to keep track of all these people.