 Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mary Shepard, Director of Events here at the McKinney's Institute. Thank you for joining us for our program, Writing Themselves Into History, Emily and the Son of Bancroft in Journals and Letters. This is Kim Bancroft. We're very proud to present this program with our co-sponsors, Hay Day Books and the California Institute for Community, Art and Nature. And I'm very pleased to have here, welcome back, Malcolm Larklin and Claire Green-Dover from ICANN. It's a pleasure to have you here. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library on the 2nd and 3rd floors, our International Chest Club right down the hallway, and of course, ongoing author and literary programs on Friday night, Cinema Lip Film Series, right here. So please check our website, milibrary.org for all of our offerings, classes, courses, chest tournaments and events. After our program, we will have a Q&A with you, our audience, and we will also be selling the books. So I'd like to introduce our special guest and talk a little bit about this book. Writing themselves in the History Office of Rich Immersion in 19th century California, dealing with Emily, Bruce Ketchum, Bancroft and Matilda Coley riffing this Bancroft's life, their life experiences in the public life, private life, motherhood, business against the backdrop of San Francisco's high society, and the state's growth amid a tumble in the American Civil War. It's part of our California history. Long time teacher, turned editor and writer, Kim Bancroft has taught at high schools and community colleges throughout the Bay Area, and also at the University of Washington, in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014, Kim edited Herbert Powell Bancroft's 1890 autobiography, Literary Industries, published by Hayley Brooks. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Hayley Brooks, the Hayley of Malcolm Marlin, who's of course here at Brooks. And also, she's also collaborated on memoirs of two native friends from the Lizards area, and where she now lives in a camp in the woods. Kim is also seeking to publish a book she wrote with a former classmate, David Waddell Cole, same school, different class, a dual memoir of school integration. But right now, let's time travel with Kim Bancroft. Good evening friends, so wonderful to be here to see you all here. Some faces I haven't seen in a long time. Well, I would first like to owe my thanks to the Mechanics Institute Library, and in particular to Laura Shepherd who helped arrange for this event to happen. It's a joy to meet in this minded place. It has its own incredible history, so learn about the Mechanics Institute. We have to go right in going with the plan. First, if you origin the stories, I hint as we all are privileged to gather here on this land, which would not exist were it not taken unceded from the along the Indians. The stories I'm honored to share with you come from all across the West that belong to native peoples originally, not to mention the Mexican people who next have their lands taken. So I first want to acknowledge our debt to the original peoples. May we never forget that what we have here and also that the Iolani peoples continue to thrive. Now for my origins, I'm going to start backwards and describing this book. I called my epilogue, Finding the Family Tree, because in the process of researching these women and their families, I discovered a whole lot of relatives. I never heard of them. I traveled up and down California, sometimes with my father called me and brought third called me. Here he is, excuse my sentimentality. I was seeking information, not only from archives, but also from some of the descendants of relatives I'd never heard of them. And it turned out my father knew some of them and was able to introduce me on our travels. On my travels, I pull out my cheat sheet and it's a little blurry here. I run into some descendants who when I showed up at their homes would say, now how are we related? And I'd say, well, you're over here and I'm over here on this family tree. In this case, I am point out here is you can see Hubert Powell Van Crock at the very top and Emily Ketchum to the left. His first wife, Emily, he married in 1859 and they had Kate together, their only daughter. Emily died in 1869. In 1876, he then married Matilda, my great-great-grandmother. They had four children, the eldest, a son named Paul. He turned out to be Paul Sr. I'm one of four of the children of Paul III. But so there's a James Matilda, Paul Sr., and then there's Paul III, my father, and here I am with my three brothers way down there. Matilda also had four children, one girl and three boys. The origins of my curiosity about the women in the family came in 1966. When my father asked me then director of the Van Crock Library, Jim Hart, to take a tour on with his family, my father, my mother, my older brother and myself. I was about eight years old at the time. Mr. Hart walked us through the mysterious labyrinth of the stacks in the basement of the Van Crock Library and then stopped by a few very old books with leather covers. He said that these books had been written by my great-great-grandmother many years ago about her children in the 1880s. So seemingly randomly, Mr. Hart pulled out a volume and opened to a page. It was a book that she had written about her daughter Lucy. The children was describing a scene in which Lucy's three older brothers were setting off for Walnut Creek, and this is when Walnut Creek was really just a creek. And they wanted to go hunting for children's fishes. Well, Lucy, about age four, wanted to go to, but they didn't want her to lag on, as she said. So they ran on ahead. The children wrote that Lucy was found on the road, quote, screaming at the top of her voice, the voice running away. Mama Matilda felt sorry for what she called the harsh, unfeeling treatment of Lucy's brothers. So I also have three obnoxious brothers, and I also knew when it was to face certain limitations as a girl, even in 1966. I never forgot that impromptu reading. So imagine how magical it was 40 years later to open that same diary and see that same passage and remember Lucy. That was because of Teresa Salazar, the curator of Western Americana at the Banff Library. She was at an open house. Here's a picture of the diary from 1877. The library had just undergone a renovation. And Teresa was standing by an exhibit of Matilda's Diaries that was under a protected glass cover. Note her knee to cursive, unlike my own. Teresa said, Kim, you should really come in here and read your great-great-grandmother's works. She was a writer in her own right. So I did as commanded, and Teresa was right. Once I began reading some of Matilda's Diaries, I encountered names I didn't recognize from my then known family tree. So I had to go back to the original. This is the original source that Malcolm and Hay Day published, the edited version of H. H. Van Croft's 1890 autobiography. This book, Literary Industries, tells the tale of how H. H. Van Croft, Keeper Cow Van Croft, had founded the Van Croft Library. When I went back to that book and started reading it, I realized, oh my gosh, there was a wife I'd never even heard of, Emily Ketchum Van Croft, who had a daughter. They had virtually disappeared from my family war, as had Matilda's daughter Lucy. So why had they disappeared? Well, in a family dominated by a patriarchal man, to whom all of the power and the property and the privilege was being passed along to the sons, the daughters didn't matter very much. Not in those respects. That was not unfamiliar during that time. And even in this time when we think about Iran and Afghanistan, the same is true. So we have come a long way in some ways. My subsequent investigation created a wonderful opportunity to read these letters written in private and semi-private and discover what they reveal about the lives of women, children, families, and communities long ago. Now when I say H. H. Van Croft was patriarchal, there's what he had to say about women's capacity to write. Writing, he said, is hard work, the hardest of work, not for frail and tender women. Constant pressure on the brain, constant tension of the send-us, is not for women. Yet he had two wives who wrote prodigiously, conveying substantial information. They described the social realities they experienced, including race and class relations, their feelings when confronting hardships, and they had hardships. The nature of childbirth and childbirth in the late 1800s. What life was like in the still nascent, dune-filled city of San Francisco, along with travels and trails far beyond the Bay Area. Despite H. H.'s critique of women as professional writers, we know that he did encourage Matilda to write about her experiences and her diaries. And because he was an archivist and a publisher, he made sure that both wives' writing was preserved, for which I am very grateful. How many of us can know in such detail the lives of our great-great-grandmothers or even grandmothers? So now we have these two well-developed characters from the past who shed light on the complexities of their lives. I'll share a little bit about each one. First, Poignant Emma. In 1859, H. H. Van Croft had a San Francisco store for selling books and stationery, which eventually became the finest on the whole West Coast. But at the time it was still a modest enterprise located on merchants in Montgomery Street, not far from where we are, where the Trans-America pyramid is today. So imagine this. You're 25 years old, single, already an old maid in some people's eyes in 1850. But you get a chance to marry an intellectual bookseller and go live with him in the new city of San Francisco, 3,000 miles away, leaving behind your beloved family in Buffalo, New York. Would you do it? That Emily Ketchum did shows the spirit of adventure she had in her. That comes and comes through in her writings. Now to get to her new home in San Francisco from Buffalo, Emily took the blue route. So here's New York. So she took the blue route coming down along the coast on the steamer, crossed the midst of Panama on a railroad and came back up the other side. A trip that took six weeks at least and was not easy at all. On one such trip in 1862, for example, after having visited her family in Buffalo, Emily was returning to San Francisco with her then small daughter Kate. While still on board, she wrote to her family about the journey. I see plenty of seasickness as this ship rolls terribly. She's small and dirty. Yesterday morning was so rough that all we could do was hold on to something all day to keep from rolling over. Kate has just pitched over, chained and all. I managed to save her. How iconically this mother talks about saving her small daughter from pitching over into the roiling sea. Another example of Emily's deep strength comes in an 1860 story about taking a horseback ride with her husband around the whole bay, starting in San Francisco. This shows the bay area a few years later. Emily's husband, Hubert, wanted her to enjoy the adventure with him. So she went knowing she'd suffered one of her perpetual terrible headaches, the kind that laid you out. She wrote of the plan. It takes four days to go and come. We ride the first day to San Mateo, 30 miles, and about as far the next day and so on. They propose to have fast horses. I expect to have the headache all the way. But as Hubert has talked a great deal about that ride and seems rather disposed to go, and as I won't be in fashion until I've taken that trip, I suppose I must. Emily had a known nonsense side to her. This image shows Russian Hill in 1855, a few years before Emily arrived. Note the dunes. Early in her life in San Francisco, she sent a letter home disparaging the way women in the city seem to be, quote, so dragged and tired out. She wrote, I believe it is the hills. They are very tiresome. You can't go anywhere here without toiling up a steep hill somewhere. And then when a lady returns from a trip downtown, she is tired most to death. Now, can you imagine hauling these long curves up and down the hills, no nice sidewalks, mud in the streets? That was tough. Here's an image of one of Emily's hundreds of letters and how they were bound now located at UC San Diego. Having left her husband, her family behind for her husband, Emily did all she could to explain to them what her new life was like so far away. She wrote one set of letters to her parents and another set to her sister Kate. Realized that in those days, it would also take weeks for a letter to get from one post to the other, often along the same route that she herself had come down the steamer by steamer down one post across the railroad and then up the next post. So that meant 12 weeks to get a reply to a letter. If you had sent news that was about something very significant in your life, perhaps a pregnancy or an illness or a death, you wouldn't hear back for 12 weeks. So nowadays, when people say, oh, I'm sorry, I haven't written back to you. It's been a day, instant text, messenger. We had nothing number 12 weeks of waiting. Emily shared with you a key interest in what he called the anatomizing of human behavior. She sought to inform her family about how she experienced the variety of people she met from San Francisco's mayor to the girls who helped her at home. For instance, she praised her wonderful African-American helper Adelaide, but Emily explained that she could not abide Irish Catholic girls who were looking for work, showing her own prejudices. In relation to current events of the time, including the Civil War, Emily shared sharp observations. For example, she pinpointed a secession, referring to the many secessionists in California. In April 1864, on a trip to the then farm country of San Jose, Emily stayed with an acquaintance, a white woman who had been recently transplanted from the south. She showed a kind laziness, as Emily saw it. She wrote, this lady has, of course, been accustomed to slaves and knew nothing about work until she came out here four years ago, so she doesn't manage as farm lines do in general. It takes her an hour every morning to bathe and dress herself, so sometimes it's late before she gets to breakfast. Emily also wrote home in April 1865 about her shock at the death of the president, oddly from a newspaper image and probably this one, she pieced together that in the theater box with Lincoln and his wife was Emily's old friend Clara Harris from the Albany area. Another significant event for San Francisco at the time that she recorded on was the 1864 death of Thomas Starr King, a famous minister of the Unitarian Church, only 39 years old when he died. This is an image of Starr King speaking on a street corner to give you a sense of his celebrity presence. Emily sought to break her family into the movie scene of his death. We've heard this morning she wrote that Starr King is dead. I could not believe it at first. He was a healthy looking man. I believe his disease was diptheria. It was a sudden death and much felt in the community. It's very popular. He'd been prominent and given lectures for charitable purposes. He always drew a full house. His last lecture was to help pay the debt of one of our congregational churches. The flags all over the city are at half-mast for him. Life in the 1860s had its particular dangers. Emily wrote about what happened to a river boat that she almost took from Auburn to Sacramento and continuing on to Oakland, one similar to this. She said, I was intending to go home on Thursday, but Aunt said, wait until Saturday. That boat that went down Thursday blew up. 40 or 50 lives lost and a great number hurt. Wasn't it a narrow escape? Well, it actually turned out that life was especially precarious for Emily because she was harboring a mysterious disease. She reported dozens of headaches, as I mentioned before. We call them migraines today that were seemingly induced by eating cooked or natural sugars. Over the years, following Kate's birth, Emily lost two more babies, at least. Here's an 1864 letter labeled, you'll see, private on top. She didn't want it read at home as entertainment as so many letters were given there were a few entertainments available. The letters were received and eagerly absorbed for days. Emily had given birth to a fine-looking baby girl, but the baby died within two hours of her birth. The reason for Emily's wish for privacy with this letter was because she had explained to her mother that Hubert had bought a little puppy and brought it home to draw off her mother's milk from her painfully engorged breasts after the baby's death. By 1868, Emily was suffering wasting, debilitating fatigue, blindness. She died in childbirth in 1869, age 35. And she wasn't supposed to get pregnant again. Hubert had actually written a letter back to Emily's family saying it looked like she should not be ever pregnant again and this is why. The diagnosis was kidney disease. So I asked an endocrinologist, Dr. Ryan Law, at Stanford how to understand the forensic trail of Emily's disease based on her letters, what she was writing home. He surmised that Emily likely had diabetes. And when he saw this photo, he noticed that she probably had thyroid problems as well and see the goiter on her neck. When Emily died, she left behind her only child, nine-year-old Kate. And this is Kate probably age five. In his autobiography, H.H. Van Cross lamented, other men's wives have died before and left them as crushed as I was. But mine had never died and I knew not what it was to disjoint and bear that part of myself. After Emily's death, her husband lapsed into a long depression. Though he worked on as ever before. At that time, at age 37, he began devoting himself and his resources to collecting everything possible on the history of the Pacific West. But he called his bibliomania. Both maps, pamphlets, government documents, oral histories. A couple of years later, he found relief from his ongoing depression. When a woman friend suggested to him, the next 10 years will be the best in your life. What are you going to do with them? In seeking a new purpose for his life, Van Cross decided to make use of his growing collection of Western Americana. Now about 16,000 items in his private library. He hired library assistants who helped research and write what would become Van Cross Works. A history of the Pacific West in 39 volumes. And you can see they're all as thick as that one. Now one thing Van Cross was not going to do was remarried. By 1875, he was deeply at work on his histories. He said, my great fear of marrying was I should fasten to my side a person who would hurry me off the stage before my task was done for otherwise so confounding that I should never be able to complete my labors. However, in Matilda Gribbing, A.J. Van Cross found the perfect match. Matilda was very enthusiastic about her new husband's endeavors. And her stories showed that she engaged as much as possible in his intellectual life as writer, traveler, historian, oral historian, teacher of their children, and even as a businesswoman. An intriguing aspect for me of reading these women's letters and journals was how they were essentially married to two different men in a sense. Emily's husband was a bookstore owner, a businessman, and then a collector. But by the time Matilda married him in 1876, he now had this huge enterprise on Market and 7th Street, printing and publishing as well as selling books. And he had the men on the 5th floor, as he called them, the 5th floor now being his library, where he had continued to collect so much. They were busily helping him write the first of his volumes on the history of the Pacific West called Native Races. Matilda began her writing immediately. Here's that diary from 1876. Seemingly after the haste of A.J. Van Cross, he suggested that she start keeping her own record of what they were seeing and doing. When Matilda had her first baby, Paul, my great-grandfather, she left him behind in 1878 and with eight months old only in order to travel with her husband and spend two months collecting in the Northwest. Look, there we are. They traveled as far as Vancouver by steamer and then returned south by rail, ferry, simple wagon, stage coaches. Matilda's diary from the 1878 captures her thrill at new vistas and intriguing people she met. For example, in Vancouver, she met Lady Amelia Douglas, the creed wife of the former Vancouver governor. Matilda learned about the different ways that Native women who had intermarried with European trappers became integrated into Canadian society, even at the highest levels. Matilda also described the perils of traveling rough roads and rivers, including a trip through Oregon's rugged mountains on a stage coach much like this. She had one humorous story. While I think of the hardships of the immigrants 20 or 30 years ago, I hesitate to write complainingly of our ride here. As we started, though, the driver remarked to me that we would go down as bad as any in the Rocky Mountains. That it was going down into the bowels of the earth. She truly noted how the driver enjoyed making voyage even scarier by remarking that his horse would shy. She wrote, it would get awful scared, said he, and his collar don't fit correctly so it might slip off. I mightfully suggest it, but your break will be your dependence. That's no great. I told them today it wouldn't hold and ought to be fixed before we started. Matilda included Riley. I think our driver wanted to impress us with his great skill in conquering difficulties. Matilda wrote five other journals besides that first one, including one for each of her four children, begun at their births and continuing through the first 10 years of their lives. Accounts of what you think they'd say and do, what they studied under her tutelage, and the mischief they got into which was considerable, especially with three boys, including burning down a barn. Matilda also used these journals to remark on where the family traveled and lived, including when Papa journeyed to gather sources for his histories. Matilda's diaries had practical uses as well. For example, Philip, the youngest son, often had severe respiratory distress. Matilda finally consulted a doctor and expert and she wrote, he was very much interested in the sketch I was able to give him, a Philip's condition from babyhood I made it out from this journal, which he said was a remarkable diagnosis from a layman who would keep such a record but a mother. Matilda also recorded the various remedies that were prescribed to her children over those many years, including brandy, wine, electricity, roaches in brocation, presslin' burned as a vapor, arsenic, clodmium, and cocaine. So for all of the many details that Matilda was capturing about each child and their whole family, note that these children were born less than two years apart, which meant she was keeping these simultaneous journals going hundreds of pages for several years. I dare not ask how many of us have kept journals and that much information about our own children's lives or even our own lives. I have not. Matilda also became a property manager of sorts for the family since both Philip and H.H. himself had these sensitivities to respiratory problems. They kept seeking a drier climate. They first went over the hills to Walnut Creek where they bought a large tract of land and then there they started to farm. Lucy writing, Philip eventually inherited that farm and his daughter-in-law Ruth Van Croft developed several acres into an amazing succulent garden which I hope some of you have visited and if you haven't, please do the Ruth Van Croft garden in Walnut Creek. In their letters, I found great fondness between Matilda and her husband in the many ways they mutually supported each other. Together they faced a terrible catastrophe in 1886 when Van Croft's entire store burned down and that's his store consumed by flames and smoke. Fortunately, he'd already moved his library to a fire state location south of San Francisco on then army and Valencia streets. In the aftermath of this disaster, H.H. wrote to Matilda about his concern of the 300 workers and how to forge ahead in order to keep them in work. But he was concerned about her worries as well. He wrote, you are a very good woman, Matilda, and are standing up splendidly under this great affliction which seems greater and greater to me every day but you don't tell me of your headaches and heartaches. She may not and wanted to burden him with her own problems but he knew she had them. Years later, at the time of the 1906 earthquake, the family had a building in San Francisco comprised of small apartments there on your left. This spectacular ruins resulted from the earthquake and subsequent fire captured in this photo on the right. It was St. Dunstan's at Vanessa and Sutter. Matilda had written many letters to her then adult sons about developing clientele and creating a welcoming cultural mecca for visitors or renters in the properties. She had some ideas about how to create the kind of cultural mecca I would say that Mechanics Library has right here. And by the way, you should note that the original Mechanics Institute was completely destroyed by the earthquake and fire including, I believe, the entire original library. So we are now here visiting in the ashes in the Phoenix Risen from those ashes. As I said, Matilda was a forward thinker, a dreamer and a schemer for the good. The family sought to sell this other property they had outside of San Diego. This one called Helix Farms. Matilda seemed to make it into a sanitarium or a kind of refuge for the urban poor. After listening to a lecture by Jacob Rees who had written an 1890 book called How the Other Half Lives and Dining the Depiction of Urban Slum Conditions. And I believe that the lecture that Matilda heard was had taken place at beyond Alamora Theater, not very far from near either. In 1905, Matilda explained to her son, Griffin, her scheme to convert the farm into a beneficial social project. She wrote, I've written to Mr. Jacob Rees a strong letter which I think will carry considerable weight and enlist his sympathy and help. I told him that when he was here in San Francisco I attended his lecture and was very much impressed with his ideas regarding poverty and relieving or minimizing it and what an individual could do that a great power for good was clear in my mind. I told him of our plan for the preservation of families and the prevention of sickness and consequent pauperism and that to carry out the idea hundreds of acres would be necessary and a large amount of money. Then I went on with an enthusiasm and faith in the project that I really feel. I asked him if he wouldn't come out to California and father the plan, give the project his support and so made our philanthropists have confidence in it. Matilda's plan was never adopted but it shows her far-thinking ability and her passion for promoting the good. Unfortunately, she had to rely on her husband and sons in order to enact her dream and they didn't. She never had the power or took it as a woman of her class and time. Two final comments on Matilda's works. Back in 1878, Wiley Vancouver Matilda learned the art of being an oral historian and she began writing down the reminiscences of Reverend John Goode. After having witnessed her husband and his clerks taking dictations or oral histories, Matilda said, I craved as a favor that I might take dictations so have begun with Mr. Goode. He has worked with wonderful assiduity for five days or parts of days I have written as fast as he would dictate. The experiences he related work themselves fantastic. From his stories, Matilda learned among other things about the struggles of the First Nations peoples there on Vancouver Island, what became Vancouver Island and how they had suffered terribly from the invasion of poverty disease. Two years later, Matilda played a crucial role as an oral historian in capturing the dictations of the Latter-day Saints women from Utah. Here's one, Jane Snyder Richards. She was the first wife of 10 of one of the elders of the church. It would have been improper for a gentile man, non-LDS non-mormon, to ask personal questions of the family lives of these women. But Matilda elicited amazing information about the plight of the Mormon people, uprooted and often chased out violently from the east and then pushed further and further west. The women in these oral histories revealed the conundrums they experienced when their husbands wished to tame another wife. Matilda captured how these speakers were able to reconcile through their faith the nature of plural marriage. She listened with a seeming objectivity to this perspective on polygamy that she probably didn't agree with, yet she gave her interviewees all due respect. And until this interview with Jane Snyder Richards, for example, Jane explained, in polygamy, a man marries again from a sense of religious duty. He consults with his wife, and with her consent and perhaps recommendation, takes to himself another wife. His religion demands it, and all three enter polygamy with earnest convictions of it being done in the sight of God at his command. From Jane, Matilda learned that one purpose of plural marriage was to provide a husband to women who had been widowed. Jane said that after her own brother-in-law's death, I gave my sister to my husband. Now we were able to do much more for her comfort. It wasn't all easy, of course. Matilda also captured the sometimes painful details of entering a plural marriage that some of these women related to her. She wrote these lines about Jane from a separate interview. When the subject of polygamy was first talked of between Mr. Richards and herself, Jane said she could yield to everything but the children. That she should feel like ringing the neck of any other child than hers that should call him Papa. However, with time, she saw clearly that it was in accordance with Mormon teachings, and it was not such a trial that she had first feared. These stories about the sister wives are, of course, very extraordinary and were fortunate that Matilda took him down. Finally, I'll mention one last important role that Matilda played regarding her health, getting H. H. Van Cross library sold to UC Berkeley. He gave his wife credit for her contributions to the sale of the library, for she herself had met with some UC administrators and faculty in order to convince them of the value of her husband's collection. In September 1905, in a letter to his son Griffin, H. H. exhorted him to live up to his mother's example of industriousness. He said, work hard as your mother does in selling the library. The library was indeed sold in November 1905. Months later, in April 1906, in that major earthquake that devastated San Francisco, Van Cross library fortunately stayed safe at the southern edge of the city. In May 1906, just a month later, it's now 60,000 items were ferried across the bay to UC Berkeley. Here is Matilda with my grandfather around 1909. Sadly in 1910, Matilda Van Cross died relatively young at age 62 of angina, a heart attack. Her husband was already 68 and he would live another eight years. H. H. was described in his youth as a man of tremendous vigor and strength, which empowered his grand visions and projects. I think he just about tuckered out his wife who was short of stature and she described in her writing some ailments that she had that may have led to her heart attack. But Matilda was huge of heart and ambitions herself and fortunately we now have her words to prove it. Thank you for your attention and I'll welcome your questions. That was absolutely illuminating. We're going to open for questions and if you have a question or a comment you have a microphone and we'll send it your way. So any questions from our audience? It's great to see this parallel to Mechanics Institute of History in terms of timeline. Any questions? Good. What surprised you the most about her character and also how did that change who you are as a woman today? How does that inform you? That's my friend Brad asking always good questions. Well, let's see. What surprised me I guess and you came in with the second part here about Matilda. So about Matilda what perhaps surprised me was so many things. She had all of these roles that she was able to play that she was could be a business woman and oral historian, writer, teacher that I am a whole chapter about how she was major teacher of her children and also following H.H. Van Croft who was peripatetic. He was living in San Francisco in Alameda in Oakland and going back and forth and traveling all over together. So the fact that she could keep up with him and was able to guide her children through all of that and write all of these books was fascinating. And I think for me in terms of how it affected me there are so many times now that when we say oh, this is so hard or I couldn't get the buzz where I had to walk or I live in a cabin in the woods and I depend on solar power who cares about electricity when you think about what you had in 1890 so here's an opportunity for me to have a bigger perspective about life I think once I've immersed myself in their past lives. Question here. Thank you. It's just fascinating insight into this family this sort of pioneering California family just the abundance and repository of all this material amazing. In your academic journals and literary journals have you just other families in California that have this sort of abundance of resources or is this pretty pretty unique? I think it's true for a lot of families who especially during the early gold rush when people came out here there were a lot of early settlers who were fascinated by what they were experiencing and seeing and then that became again a repository for their stories that have ended up in libraries and maybe even Laura you could speak to any of the I know the original journals and a lot of amazing papers were destroyed in the fire but you surely have gotten some others back that chronicle the lives of families who were here. Well, actually we've had Elizabeth Partridge and her grandfather was I mean I'm exactly correct and her father is an artist but anyway but we do have a lot of you know, biology and a library. I'm not a librarian but we all are cataloged for California history. We have a great collection of California and San Francisco history in the library so there are a great resources for that. Any other questions? Questions coming up right here. First of all that was fantastic. Thank you. So just yesterday we were talking about how you would be speaking in Stanford with the self-renewed it's really exciting and I was thinking I thought it would be a great textbook for a women's studies course so if it is a textbook for a women's studies course what are some of the key takeaways that you think would be important for young women's studies students? I think for one thing as I've kind of mentioned about Emily I feel that to see the strength that women had who were coming to into their own power but in sometimes very private ways as mothers as women who were trying to have a role in their community and to see how this attention to detail can also be very powerful in writing down what it is that we have before us and what we can offer to the world and there's so many details in the book that I couldn't really obviously speak to in this talk but Emily for example was a wonderful seamstress and she talked about all of the things that she was creating as a seamstress as a cook and the things that we can appreciate that were part of the private lives of women as well as how they were listening to what the men were doing for them. So I think there's as a young feminist there's ways that we can look back at the richness of women's lives that have been ignored. It was really wonderful in the spread of the pictures everything all together but a couple of things. I was really moved and impressed about the whole idea of the letter that that was in the time that we'd wait for a letter most and hear all the latest and the same back and everyone would all sit around with us and be like it's like storytelling and maybe now we're doing it on Zoom calls but I just thought that was really and then I wonder clearly the fact that both of them were married to someone who was creating books and they took the initiative but did they have other contemporaries, other women who were also writing and did any other than your family take this up are there other diaries that you have? Is there anyone in between anyone else who has a record writing that you've come across? I don't know anybody else in my family I'm sure they're there. A lot of us keep diaries that are places for us to discord some of our feelings if we don't want anybody else to ever see them. In this case because Emily's letters were public or semi-public within her family then she was mostly conscious of what other people were going to be reading so for example there was the letter that was private about what happened with the puppy after her daughter's death and there was also a letter that she wrote to her mother apologizing for letting her child go to dancing school because Emily came from a stripping Presbyterian family and so that was she was apologizing privately to her mother. So there were some private things that were part of that but she would talk about oh your letter arrived and I spent the whole evening going through it and reading it and Hubert was excited to read it as well she'd write her, I explain in the book she'd write and say Monday and then write a couple of paragraphs and then write another page on Tuesday and Wednesday labeled them and she'd say the steamer is coming tomorrow I've got to get this letter out so there was this sense that there was this urgency of sending off these four team pages by now that she had onion skin paper to make sure that the family was in touch with the latest installment of her news and one another thing that I put in the book there's another volume of letters from her parents to her but paper and we don't think about how fresh is some of these resources so paper was so precious that they would write in one direction and then turn it sideways and write crosswise on the same page and frankly I just gave up I was like I am not going to read all of it so there's a rich source of research for somebody there I have a question I love your talk I'm curious I know that you must have had to leave some things out can you share something that you wish you could have included in the book that just you didn't have room for I wasn't your overarching story well there was one whole chapter there was another diary that Matilda wrote about the family's journey to Mexico in the late 1890s when the four children were probably 14, 12, 10, and 8 and I had written a chapter about that because I found it fascinating to see what Matilda found fascinating in Mexico and some of it was throughout the book I was always interested in how she and also Emily would talk about recent class relations and how they saw their own positions as this middle class or upper middle class Victorian family in relation to others that they were seeing out in the world so for example Matilda wrote about as they were taking a train through the Southwest seeing some of the poor Indian people who would come to the train stations and her comments about how dirty they looked and then being in Nexifone thinking that some of those families that they saw there were living in dirt poverty and they stand that so there was always this interesting thing for me to look at her assumptions about those others and try to put them in perspective in the book and there were a lot of other things she also had described in their trip to Mexico but I have to leave all of that out once it's enough for me for everything two things very quick I apologize for walking out right from the beginning that's because one of the family members was calling and trying to zoom in it was former governor Jerry Brown and he said he tried for 10 minutes to zoom in and said Jerry there isn't a zoom this is all the time but you'll be sure he knows about the other stuff just a good book but in any case Malcolm had a question which is were the women happy with their lives were Matilda and Emily happy that's a great question and yes so Emily there are places that I speak in the first chapter about their relationship and she says things to her sister about it Hubert is just the best old soul I'm so lucky and she really was lucky because there were a lot of women who were sort of marrying somebody a mail order bride coming out of opportunities back home or the family wanted to get rid of them and said go be a teacher go out west and so the fact that she had met this man and really didn't know him that well but that he was kind and generous to her what is a real benefit throughout her life and I would say the same is true for Matilda that she just gobbled up these opportunities to learn and travel and to enjoy her opportunities and I would say yes there is going to be a Zoom presentation on March 21 through the California Historical Society and I now have this cool website that Matilda would never have even understood and so that's all of my events and I'm also starting a blog about what it's like to live in the cabin in the woods in relative simple conditions like these women lived and how I transmogrify some of those thoughts into what came out in the book you really brought them to life for me so it's just the photos of the way you frame the story and told gave us their voices and I'm very curious about your dress did you have someone make it tell me that I used to graduate when I was a kid I taught in a high school and my friends here knew me back in the day and I was the faculty sponsor of the fashion club which was not my thing fashion at all but they needed somebody just so they could understand that that was my runway walk so I would watch these students doing their runway walks and their fashion show moves while I was sitting in the audience and I'd come home to my housemates and say, look at what I've learned today there are hardly any Matilda between them but this actually is I found a wonderful company called Recollections Online and so you can order these kinds of outfits or not too much money it's wonderful and it's fun to play dress up question that was fascinating and I'm really curious about your process because there's a lot of volumes that you must have read and how you go about you know crafting the ideas that come into your mind as you're constructing this book and how you do your note taking and all of that stuff that fascinates me and how long it took well I will start by saying one of my sources of inspiration is here in the audience Department of Theory who was my advisor at UC Berkeley and I have a PhD in Education and Jabari guided me through that process so a lot of it is actually the same process you do a lot of research through gathering from many many sources including interviews in this case it was very interesting getting to meet some of the descendants of the family tree and then going to UC San Diego into the Banff Library and other sources and copying just transcribing because you can't take these books out and at first it was just this kind of wow this is fun, look at what Matilda wrote and then it's more and more and more information and finally I found wonder is there a book in here is there a good story that other people would be interested in so there was an obvious organization of writing about Emily first and then Matilda and then finding themes for example in the case of Emily is it I discovered that she was continually referring to these headaches and her illness and finally dying then that became the last chapter on her her demise, what happened how was it connected to the babies that were born dead or came or died soon after her birth and then in Matilda's case there were all of these different goals because the diaries were written in chronological order for each child I had to kind of take them apart here she's talking about teaching here she's talking about traveling here she's talking about doing these oral histories my work was cut short in some ways because I mentioned she wrote four diaries, one for each of her children and the one about my great-grandfather Paul, the oldest child missing, it was nowhere to be found and so I found however the other diaries enough references to Paul to put together a section as well as about Emily's daughter Kate who was about 16 when her father married Matilda and so Kate was obviously a part of the family referred to as sister Kate throughout so it was 12 years of researching and writing and thinking about it and finding a way to organize as much as I did with the PhD dissertation I would say good question question so Kim's dissertation was over 500 pages long twice as long it's almost any of the students working with but I think what I'm continuing friendship with and what inspired me is and for us all is that all of our families have stories to tell and we have to get rich a set of documents that Kim has had access to but I think we all would be remiss if we don't find even when our grandparents or our parents are alive ways to capture some of that insight into what their lives were because it's building a market at our own whether we do it or not if I can follow that up one thing I learned because my father was so proud of age H. Mancroft in the library and got us interested in oral histories so I naturally gravitated to want to do oral histories so not too long ago with DeBarre I said he had visited and was telling me about his wonderful stories of his family I said I kind of let him take the quarter in front of you and one thing that's been interesting to me for several people and this actually includes Darryl B. Wilson who Malcolm had put me in touch with to edit his book sometimes certain kids are really fascinated by old people and by those stories that they have and DeBarre told me about me going down to visit your relatives and was it Kentucky? and maybe sitting around talking and he acted like he was sleeping on the couch listening in on the stories so that storytelling is the oldest I think like the oldest art form I just think about us all sitting on a bar around a fire somewhere and entertaining each other and that's what this has been and such a wonderful adventure of storytelling for me any other questions? well I have a question Kim are you collecting all your emails for the future generations for your incredible books and biographies and histories what are you leaving behind? well I do have some of those some of those journals that are I actually started I started Diaries when I was 7 and Harriet the Spy was a really great influence on me because she would spy on people and then write in her little composition book I actually did that I went through the neighborhood and looked in one of my neighbor's windows Mr. Clark I come into the room and was watching TV and I thought what if I saw him kill somebody Mr. Clark is not going to kill anybody but I thought I can't spy but I can still write so I do have those Diaries emails we are losing a lot of precious documents because people do not keep their emails and they will disappear so I have letters including for some people in this room from many many years ago that I'm keeping in and returning to people as a form of thanking them for their archives well I'd like to thank Madam Bancroft for this amazing presentation including the lives of Emily and Matilda Bancroft and really expressing their intelligence for us today so thank you again and we're going to sell books please purchase your books and have them signed and we've got to get a couple pictures of you as well thank you for something