Virginia Louise Miller Grabow

Published 2:46 pm Friday, June 20, 2025

Virginia Louise Miller Grabow
January 25, 1932 – March 16, 2025

Books. Cats. Family. Learning. The Oregon Coast. In no specific order, these are some of the things that brought joy to Ginny in her 93 years.
Born in Portland and a lifelong Oregonian (not counting two years in Georgia as an “army wife”), she spent her childhood in that city and also many happy weeks and months at her grandparents’ cabin on the Oregon coast. After her parents moved to Medford, Oregon, she graduated from Medford High School before enrolling at Southern Oregon College. Soon, Ginny transferred to Oregon State University (Go Beavs!), studying English Lit., and becoming a proud member of the Alpha Phi sorority.

In 1952, Ginny married John Grabow and they began their 73 years of life together. She raised two boys in Lake Oswego, and, always drawn to books, started volunteering at their grade school library. This eventually led to her career working at another grade school library for many years. Even after leaving the school district, she again volunteered at the Lake Oswego Public Library and finally, running the church library at Calvin Presbyterian in Tigard until into her 80s. Ginny embodied the mantra “so many books, so little time.” She read extensively, with much time devoted to Tudor England.

All the years reading (usually with a cat on her lap) and time in the library stacks grew into a desire to put that to use learning more about her own family. So after her retirement, her next act was becoming a genealogist. Ginny drew on the known family stories and history about more recent ancestors and it grew from there. By the time she hung up her researcher’s hat, she had written two volumes on her Civil War era great-great grandfather and in the other, traced one family thread all the way back to a Cornish landholder, Paganus Pridias, in Saxon England.

Ginny is survived by her two sons, John Jr. and Mark; her four grandkids; three great-grandkids; two step-grandkids; and nephew and nieces Sam, Jody, and Karen. After learning so much from and about her ancestry, she’s now added herself to the long family line of ancestors and is ready for her own book.

A celebration of her life will be held at Young’s Funeral Home, 11831 SW Pacific Highway Tigard, OR on September 6, 2025 at 11:00am.