A Little Background

I have always been fascinated with stories of the past. As a little girl I loved to hear the story of my great grandmother Catherine Emma Farrar (for whom I was named), who crossed the plains to Utah with her sister Sarah in a Mormon handcart company before the advent of the railroad. It was a simple story, as my dad told it, but as I grew older I yearned for more. Always one to question, I could never quite be satisfied with what seemed to be only the framework of a story. In the mid-1990s, as my mother's health was failing, I started asking her for more details about her family, particularly the women. She gathered some information for me, talked to me and even wrote down some of her remembrances. I wrote up some of this information into some small vignettes, but still there seemed to be so much missing.

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I decided to get really serious about researching my ancestors' stories. By this time the Internet had changed the scope of available information and I took off running. The result was Not Just Keeping House: My Pioneer Mormon Mothers, a book I published through Wheelwright Publishing (my own company) about eight women and their families, women whose actions had a profound effect upon my life and the many thousands of their descendants.

When the book came off the press last July, I felt a great sense of accomplishment, that I had finally told the stories of these women. Yet, as my daughter Sharon said when she finished reading the book, "The story isn't finished." Indeed, there is so much more to tell. Some of it we will never know; the records simply aren't out there anywhere. But I am constantly learning more. Just today I received a new book in the mail with several chapters about the Morley family in Kirtland, Ohio, with specific mention of Diantha Morley Billings, my third great grandmother. Over this past weekend, I spent hours sifting through census and other records and think I've found the (approximate) birthplace for Phoebe Ann Babcock Patten (one of the "lost sisters" in my book).

Since I'm not really inclined to start writing another book anytime too soon (my health and my finances are still recovering from the last one), I've decided to start this blog. After all, I HAVE to write it down somewhere. Even if no one reads it, I have to keep telling these stories. Maybe at the same time, I'll tell a little of my story too. It would be impossible not to. As I discovered while writing Not Just Keeping House, no story stands alone; they are all intertwined. Like the branches of an old tree, they overlap, one leaning into another, building on each other.