Joe Blow a real person

The trouble with slang, folklore & common use of slang terms that people in general don't believe that they are about a real person. John Doe is generic. Joe Blow is an ordinary person or so many believe. I believe that Joe Blow was my grandfather. He had a name and it was Albert Dawson Helmick. He was a dynamite man and he blew things up. It is true that there are ordinary joe's and joe the plumbers, but I know that Joe Blow lived and was real. The children of Liberia wrote poems about Joe Blow when he died. The Liberian newspaper recognized Albert Helmick as "Joe Blow" and when he and others died because of a misfire of dynamite while building the Port of Monrovia, Liberia, the children cried.

You can read about how I came to the conclusion about my grandfather in my new book:
An Ordinary Guy Joe Blow by Jan Gooding Cornett

My father was adopted and raised by the Goodings and passed away in 1965. We always wondered who his parents were and what had happened to them. I tell the story of the search process when looking for your roots. I began with a birth certificate from California and pretty soon I was searching newspapers in Utah, records in Oregon, phone books in Iowa, marriage licenses in New York and passenger lists going to the West Indies and Africa. It was the combination of all these searches that revealed the poems, newspaper articles and finally pictures and telegrams about the life and death of Albert Dawson Helmick, the real Joe Blow. He was a real person and he was my grandfather.