Garrison Keillor Family History

Gary Edward Keillor, better known by the name of Garrison Keillor, was born on August 7th, 1942 to John and Grace Keillor in Anoka, Minnesota.  He was the third of their six children.

Anoka is a rural town located about a half-hour drive from Minnesota’s capital St. Paul.  Garrison’s father, a carpenter and postal worker, had built the family home there almost entirely by himself.  What this meant was that for a few years, until the two upper floors were completed, they lived in the windowed basement.

The family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist religious group that discouraged dancing, card-playing and going to movies.

Garrison graduated from Anoka High School in 1960 and from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1966.

Writing and Radio.  Garrison, a big bulk of a man, has considered himself a loner who has preferred not to make eye contact with people.  He might also be autistic, although he was not formally diagnosed as such.  What career should he have?  He chose writing, which allowed scope for his imagination, and also radio.

He began writing for The New Yorker in 1969.  Four years later the magazine gave him an assignment about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.  In writing the piece he became inspired by how the Ole Opry was showcasing local talent and he wished to do the same.

He already had some dealings with Minnesota Public Radio ((MPR); and he managed to convince them to broadcast a Saturday night edition of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.

This debuted as an old-style variety show before an audience of just twelve people in July 1974.  It featured guest musicians, had spook commercials, and ran serial melodramas.

In the second half of the show Garrison would deliver a monologue called The News from Lake Wobegon, a fictitious town based in part on Keillor’s hometown of Anoka, Minnesota.  This is a world as everyone remembers “where all the men are strong, all the women good looking, and all the children above average.”

A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison hosting ran for more than forty years, from 1974 to 2016.

Garrison’s Lake Wobegon Days, a 1985 novel based on material from A Prairie Home Companion, brought his work to a much wider audience, selling over one million copies.  This book and its follow-ups are considered to be contemporary classics, providing an unforgettable portrait of small-town American life.

Later Problems.  In November 2017 Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) cut its ties with Garrison after a freelance writer for A Prairie Home Companion had alleged improper behavior by him.  Subsequent investigations by MPR concluded that he had engaged in dozens of sexually inappropriate incidents over the years.

Garrison denied wrongdoing.  He felt that the goalposts had changed.  What had been acceptable at one time no longer was.

Six months later the two sides reached an agreement to allow archives of A Prairie Home Companion to be publicly available again.  And Garrison could continue to tour a stage version of the show.

Garrison has remained active in his eighties.  He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife and daughter.  They have also a second home in New York.

Keillor Origins

Garrison’s Keillor forebears came to Canada in 1774 from Yorkshire, not Scotland – even though Keillor and its variant Keiller are Scottish-origin names.  The name is derived from a small settlement named Keillor near Coupar Angus in the Perth and Kinross area of NE Scotland.  Some of these Scots Keillors must have made their way to Yorkshire.

The paternal line is English, with some elements of Welsh and German through marriage.  But the maternal line is Scottish.  His maternal grandparents came to Minnesota from Glasgow in 1911.

Both lines have been characterized by large families.  The largest is, surprisingly, the most recent.  His Scottish mother was one of thirteen children.

The Line in Canada

French Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast opened up for British settlement after the French defeat in 1763.  Early arrivals were from Massachusetts.  Then a large group, called “the Yorkshire immigrants,” went there from Britain – with transport supplied by the Government – between 1772 and 1775.  More than twenty ships sailed during that period, carrying about a thousand people in voyages that lasted seven weeks.

Nova Scotia Settlement.  Thomas Keillor from Skelton-in-Cleveland in Yorkshire was part of that group.  He arrived with his wife Mary and five children in 1774.  They settled near Fort Cumberland on a farm that came to be known as the Fowler homestead.

In 1776, two years later, their eldest daughter Elizabeth married William Trueman from a neighboring Yorkshire settlement.  But the marriage was threatened by Eddy rebels who had been terrorising the settlers around Fort Cumberland.  Fortunately they were able to be dispersed in time so that the young couple could return to their home.

In 1777 Thomas Keillor died.  He was just forty-eight years of age (his wife Mary lived to be seventy-seven).  They were buried in the land where they had settled.

In 1786 Thomas’s eldest son John moved twenty-five miles west to Dorchester in Westmorland county, New Brunswick where he would take up the land grant that his father had secured.

He became one of that village’s first and most prominent figures.  He was known as Judge after willing land for a new courthouse in 1803.  Keillor House in Dorchester, still standing, is believed to date from 1813.  John – who had stone masonry skills like his father – had built it.

Most of John’s siblings followed him to Westmorland county.

But John’s brother Thomas – Garrison’s four times great grandfather – remained in Nova Scotia, farming at Amherst in Cumberland county where he struggled.  The land was stony and it was hard to grow corn.  He died in 1836.

By then Thomas’s eldest son Thomas Coates Keillor had already made the move to Westmorland to join with other Keillors there.  And after his death three of his other sons would head west to Elgin county in SW Ontario where new land was opening up, good for corn growing.

Garrison’s Keillor line in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick of Canada’s Maritime Provinces would run as follows:

• Thomas Charles Keillor Sr. (1729-1777), from Yorkshire to Nova Scotia
• Thomas Charles Keillor Jr. (1762-1836), from Yorkshire to Nova Scotia
• Thomas Coates Keillor (1789-1859), from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick
• Robert Keillor (1808-1838), in New Brunswick
• William Evans Keillor (1836-1912), from New Brunswick to Minnesota

New Brunswick.  Thomas Coates Keillor was recorded in 1851 as being a farmer (proprietor) living in Westmorland, New Brunswick with his wife and children.  His grandson William took over the farm on Thomas’s death in 1859.

William had been just two when his father Robert had died in 1838 in Chatham a port town, probably as a result of a cholera epidemic.

William was a schoolmaster at first, but then took up farming.  He married his wife Mary (from an early Rhode Island family) in Nova Scotia in 1856.  We find him moving around a lot, first to Kingston in SW Ontario in the 1860’s before returning to Hopewell in New Brunswick and then crossing the border into Minnesota in 1892 and buying farmland there in 1901.  This time he was not for returning.

The Line in Minnesota

James, the eldest son of William Keillor, was the first in the family to make the move to Minnesota.  He had been working on his father’s farm until 1881 when he moved to Anoka county to help his brother-in-law James Hunt manage his farm in Ramsey township.  When James Hunt died of TB in 1885, James Keillor took over the running of the farm.

Thomas followed his brother James to Anoka, Minnesota at that time.  Finally their father William brought the rest of the family over in 1892.

John and Grace.  James’s second son, born in Ramsey township in 1913, was John Philip Keillor, Garrison’s father.

He had served with the US Army during World War Two.  Afterwards he bought an acre of cornfield at Brooklyn Park in Anoka, a stone’s throw from the Mississippi river.  There he dug a basement and built a white-frame house on it.

He worked on travelling railcars for the Railway Mail Service.

His wife Grace was the daughter of Scottish Denham immigrants who had come to Minnesota from Glasgow in 1911.  Born in 1915 and one of thirteen children, Grace had grown up in south Minneapolis, attended Roosevelt High School, and trained as a nurse.  She married her husband in 1936.  He had courted her by singing hymns with the word “Grace” in the title. 

Grace died in 2012 at the age of ninety-seven, outliving all of her twelve siblings.  But she said she had communication across the grave with her sister Elsie.

Keillor Recollections

Garrison is a great storyteller, as are others of his family.  Here are some of their recollections:

“On Memorial Day, some relatives and I went up to the country graveyard north of Anoka where my Dad’s family is buried.  We put flowers on some graves and then went to Susie’s for rhubarb pie

Rhubarb pie was a staple in the Keillor family, a sour weed stalk sweetened by strawberries, a delicacy known to rural people of limited means.  They were devout gardeners who loved the Lord and studied the Bible and knew something about hard times.  I spent time in homes with outhouses where cooking was done on a woodstove and you took a bath in a tin tub of hot water on the kitchen floor.  A glimpse of the 19th century.

There were storytellers in the family who loved to visit and talk many things; about their great grandfather who went to Colorado for silver (David Powell had illegally crossed the Missouri river in 1859 during the Colorado Silver Boom but never found any silver); and there was a farmer with the urge to keep moving and his father-in-law, a British seaman who had jumped ship and escaped hanging (William Cox of the Powell line); and how James Keillor, a skilled carpenter, left New Brunswick to help his sister Mary whose husband had died of TB.  He took over the farm in Ramsey township and raised her kids and then married Dora Powell, the schoolteacher in the school across the road.

Then there was Grandpa James buying the first Model T in Ramsey township.  He drove it home and turned in at the yard and forgot what he was dealing with.  He pulled back hard on the wheel and shouted “Whoa!” and the car went in the ditch and he had to hitch up his horses and pull himself out.  He was laughing when the car went into the ditch and he was laughing as he towed it out, so Aunt Ruth told me.”

Garrison Keillor’s Family Tree

• Canadian Line

• William Evans Keillor from Chatham, New Brunswick m. Mary Crandall (1835-1922) in Nova Scotia in 1856.  He moved for a time to Kingston, Ontario, later returning to New Brunswick.  He migrated with his family to Minnesota in 1892.
• – Mary Keillor (1856-1945) m. James Hunt (died in 1885), moved to Minnesota in 1881
• – Rebecca Keillor (1858-1937)
• – James Keillor (1860-1933), moved to Minnesota in 1881
• – Thomas Keillor (1861-1937), moved to Minnesota in 1885 and later possibly to England
• – Elizabeth Keillor (1864-1946) m. Benjamin Crandall
• – Amelia Keillor (1870-1945) m. William Loucks
• – Alfred Keillor (1873-1963) m. Amelia Luthi

• James Crandall Keillor from Kingston, Ontario moved to Minnesota in 1881 and m. Dora Powell, the schoolteacher from Iowa (1880-1964) in Anoka, Minnesota in 1906
• – Ruth Keillor (1907-1962) m. Raymond Blumer
• – Robert Keillor (1909-1971) m. Flora Allen
• – James Keillor (1910-1970) m. Mary Amies
• – Josephine Keillor (1912-1979), born in New Brunswick, m. Raymond Davis
• – John Keillor (1913-2001)
• – Elizabeth Keillor (1918-1991), born in New Brunswick, m. Lawrence Ducommun
• – Eleanor Keillor (1921-1996) m. Alrige Johnson

• John Phillip Keillor from Anoka, Minnesota, carpenter and postal worker m. Grace Ruth Denham from Hennepin, Minnesota (1915-2012) in 1936
• – John Philip (Phil) Keillor (1937-2009), engineer m. Ann-Britt Edlund from Sweden, moved to Wisconsin and died in an ice skating accident
• – Judith Keillor (b. 1938) m. Thomas Locke and moved to South Carolina
• – Gary Edward (Garrison) Keillor (b. 1942)
• – Stanley (Stan) Keillor (b. 1948) m. Kay Gornick
• – Steven (Steve) Keillor (b. 1948), historian m. Margaret Louden
• – Linda Keillor (b. 1951) m. David Berg