In her book “Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow,” author Dedria Humphries Barker tells the true story of her Irish American great-grandmother Alice Donlan.

“Mother of Orphans” is unlike most Irish immigrant stories. Alice Donlan was a second-generation Irish American who married a Black man, John Henry Johnson, in 1899 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many doubted the couple married during the hostile Jim Crow era, but their marriage license proved what Humphries calls a “love match.”

After Alice’s husband died in 1912, the following year, for financial reasons, she returned to work as a hotel maid, and placed her three mixed-race children, ages 10, 8, and 2 in an orphanage. The oldest child, a daughter, became Humphries’ grandmother.

What Irish Alice died in Detroit in 1963 surrounded by her Black family, Humphries began to wonder about the orphan “story.” In finding missing details, she discovered her Irish heritage.

Dedria Humphries’ book is part-genealogical research and part-mystery while telling the complex story of race relations and mixed-race family dynamics in the early part of the twentieth century. “One generation’s secrets,” Humphries said, “is another generation’s history.”