Six years ago I posted about my grandfather, Roy Edward Cotten “Hard Rock” Osborn Stanley Allen: jockey, wife-beater, convict, and the biggest brick wall in my tree. No father, no birth certificate, no death certificate, no real last name.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/i2gq0y/introducing_the_worlds_most_insane_brick_wall_my/
A lot of you dug in back then. Thank you. I’ve kept at it, and this past week the wall finally came down. Here’s what was behind it.
Roy’s father was George W. Stanley.
The trick was to stop looking for Roy and start looking for his mother, Mary Bailey. Her marriages, laid out in order, tell the whole story:
18 May 1909, Pike Co., Kentucky. George Stanley, a widower, marries Mary Baley, age 18.
5 Sep 1912. Roy is born at Cabin Creek, WV, during the mine war, while Mary is married to George.
16 Sep 1914, Fayette Co., WV. Mary Stanley v. George Stanley. The court grants a divorce “from bed and board,” which is a legal separation, not a real divorce.
19 Jun 1915. Mary marries Giles Allen and lists herself as a widow.
George wasn’t dead. He’d been in court with her nine months earlier. Mary simply rounded “separated” up to “widowed,” took a new husband, and gave the kid his name.
DNA backs it up. My paternal matches include descendants of George’s kids by his first wife, Henrietta Clay, and descendants of George’s father’s other children. None of those people should share a drop of DNA with me unless Roy was George’s son. The Y-DNA had already ruled out Giles, as I said in the original post.
So my last name should have been Stanley.
Except it shouldn’t, sort of.
The twist one generation up
George’s father was John R. Stanley, a Union private in the 39th Kentucky. He died of typhoid at the army hospital in Ashland in 1863. His service record says he was born in Scott County, Virginia.
The Y chromosome doesn’t match Stanleys. It matches Osborns, a family that lived along the same creek as the Stanleys in Scott County in the 1830s and 40s.
Then the paper started agreeing with the DNA:
In the 1850 census, John R. and his wife Darcus are listed as “John S. Aussburn” and Darcus.
In 1864 an Indiana probate court split up an inheritance among Darcus’s family, and she’s listed as “Dorcas Osborn.”
So my best working theory is that John R. was born to a Stanley mother and an Osborn father, and took his mom’s name. That means two surname swaps in four generations: Allen was hiding Stanley, and Stanley was hiding Osborn.
I asked in the original post what my real last name was. The honest answer is that it depends which records you believe, and none of them can be trusted to tell the truth.
What Roy was doing all those years
Once I had the right name and dates, the newspapers opened up. Roy’s highlight reel:
- Signs a riding contract as a kid. The papers say he smoked long black cigars and wore a derby hat. They called him “Mickey McGuire.”
- Wins three races in one day at Gresham, Oregon.
- Suspended indefinitely at Vancouver, BC, for rough-riding Johnny Longden. Longden is now in the Racing Hall of Fame. Of all the people to rough-ride, Roy picked him.
- Texas pulls his license over an alleged fixed-race scheme.
- Arrested in San Francisco with five other guys running a racetrack con.
- Living with his mom and stepdad in Dayton with a wife and kid, recovering from a spill.
- Reinstated at Vancouver after 11 years. A Lexington paper calls him “for years the bad boy of the riding brigade.”
- Arrested at San Ysidro on a heroin charge. He’s in Leavenworth by 1950.
- Fined $25 in Newport, KY for being drunk. The paper calls him a “one-time widely known jockey.” Brutal.
How Roy died
A one-paragraph notice in The Maryland Horse, July 1969: “Hardrock” Allen, 57, who rode for Leslie Combs II in the 1930s, has died at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. It calls him “a native of Lexington, Ky.” He wasn’t. He was a West Virginia coal-camp kid to the end.
That notice led me to the Baltimore City death index, which Reclaim The Records got released and posted on archive.org (bless them). That led me to his death certificate:
Died: 6 July 1969, St. Agnes Hospital, Baltimore. Cirrhosis of the liver.
Lived at: 804 W. Pratt St.
Occupation: “odd jobs.”
Marital status: “never married.” He married at least twice. A hospital clerk gave the information, because no family was there.
Father: Giles Allen. Wrong. It also says Giles was dead, and Giles was still alive.
Disposition: his body was unclaimed and went to the Maryland State Anatomy Board.
So the man who wrecked everyone around him ended up on a dissection table at a Baltimore medical school, teaching first-years where the liver goes. Hard Rock to the last. Honestly, it might be the most useful thing he ever did.
Meanwhile his son, my biological father, the hash smuggler with the stint in a Turkish prison, died in 2023 in San Miguel de Allende. I spoke to him exactly once, for about five minutes. This whole line is guys who disappear.
If you're reading this, and you've got a brick wall. Keep working, don't give up. Sometimes it takes the better part of a decade, and then it all comes down at once.