 Welcome, I'm going to officially get started. I'm Anissa, I'm a librarian here at San Francisco Public Library. The back table has some, our at the library newspaper, which lists all of our events. So check that out. I also set out some very fun historical, historical postcards, postcards that have a history picture on them of our reading room from, it's an illustration. So please help yourself to as many of those as you want. Our library wants to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the raw, mutitial, ony peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we are from their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the raw, mutitial community. In April, we're so lucky to have the Segorte Land Trust join us in a wild and fun hybrid Zoom action live. So we'll be zooming in everywhere, but also be live. You could go sit at the Excelsior branch and watch it. So exciting new ways to share programming with everybody. What else do I want to tell you about? We have several reading campaigns happening at the library on the same page as a bi-monthly read where we encourage all of you to read the same book at the same time. For March and April in connection with Climate Action Month, we have Dry by Neil Shusterman, and it talks about it's a fiction two weeks in Southern California where the water is shut off. So very interesting tale. Check it out. There's a book club associated with it. And we do that bi-monthly. So check on the same page. You can pick it up at any one of our 28 locations, bookmobiles, place to hold, all of that good stuff. And then of course we do have a lot of great events coming up. We are back to in person again. So thank you for joining us and gathering. I think it's really important. It was, you know, I always thought of the library as the third place and us gathering and then going into COVID. How do we rethink that? So and how do we come back from that? So thank you for being here. And of course today we are gathered here today to hear about Kim Bancroft's new book, Writing Themselves Into History, Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters, a window into the world of 19th century California from two women who experienced it firsthand. Kim earned a BA in English from Stanford and MA in English and teaching credentials from San Francisco State and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at the high schools, community colleges in the Bay Area and at Universidad de Guanajuanta in Mexico and at Sacramento State. In 2014 she edited HHB's 1890 autobiography, Literary Industries, and she has written the biography of the founder of Hay Day Books, the Hay Day of Malcolm Margollan, The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. And yay for Malcolm and yay for Hay Day Books, both just two of my favorite things in the world. And Kim, I'm so honored to have you back here on our Latino Hispanic Room stage and take it away. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you so much, Anisa, and I'm happy to see you all here. And I owe thanks to Anisa for helping set this up into Kenny and Mike for doing the tech work here to preserve this talk. So a few origin stories, I actually always like to say what Anisa just said, which is that we are privileged to gather here on this land which would not exist or it not taken unceded from the Ohlone Indians in this case. The stories I'm sharing with you come from all across the West, which belong to native peoples and then to the Mexican people next in line who had their lands taken. So I think it's important that we remember our debt to them and that native peoples are continuing to thrive. I'm calling my talk today the personal archival and inspirational. It's personal because it relates to my family and how I came to write this book. Archival to emphasize what comes out of our archives and how important it is to value them and save them and work with them. And inspirational to see what these women that you'll be learning about have coped with and accomplished in their time. Now I'm also going to say a little bit about my origins. And I'll start backwards in describing this book I called my epilogue, Climbing the Family Tree. And that was because in the process of researching these women and their families I discovered relatives I'd never heard of. Traveled up and down California, sometimes with my father Paul Bancroft, third, here he is and excuse my sentimentality, I said it was personal. And you see me in my normal guise not in the outfit of my Victorian ancestors. I was seeking information not only from the archives, but also from some of the descendants that I had been reading about when I finally learned about our family history. And you may share in the curiosity of many of the Bancroft descendants who when I'd show up at their house would say, now how are we related? So I created a ginormous family tree and this is only half of it actually because I took off all of the other descendants from it. But I would often say well here you are and here I am so they would see that there was some relation. In fact here is Hubert Howe Bancroft and then his first wife Emily who passed away in 1869, she and he begat Kate Catherine Ketchum. Seven years later he married my great great grandmother Matilda and they had four children, Paul, Griffin, Philip, and Lucy. And Paul became Paul's senior and there's my father and there am I at the bottom with my three brothers. And here are Matilda's four children. The origins of my curiosity about the women in the family came in 1966 when my father Pete asked Jim Hart, the then director of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, to give a tour to my father, my mother, my older brother, and myself. I was about eight years old at the time. So Mr. Hart walked us through the huge and mysterious labyrinth of the stacks in the basement of the library. And then stopped by a few very old books with faded leather covers. He said that the books had been written long ago by our great-great grandmother Matilda about her children in the 1880s. So randomly Mr. Hart pulls out one diary and open to a page and read from the book that Matilda had written about her daughter Lucy. Matilda was describing a scene in which Lucy's three older brothers were setting off for Walnut Creek when it really was just a creek and not a town to find toads and fishes. At about age four, Lucy wanted to go to but they didn't want her to lag on as they said and not keep up with them. Matilda in this diary that was read to me when I was eight, wrote that Lucy was found on the road, quote, screaming at the top of her voice, the boys running on ahead. Mama Matilda felt sorry for what she called the harsh, unfeeling treatment of Lucy's brothers. Well, I also had three brothers, obnoxious. And I also knew what it was to face some limitations as a girl. I never forgot that impromptu reading. So imagine how magical it was to reconnect with that same book 40 years later and many other writings by Matilda. That was because of Teresa Salazar, the curator of Western Americana at the Bancroft Library. And that is yet another reason why I love libraries. At an open house in 2008 following the Bancroft Library's renovation, Teresa was standing by an exhibit of Matilda's first diary. A page pictured here, note her neat cursive, unlike my own. Teresa said, Kim, you should come in here and read your great-great-grandmother's writings. She was a writer in her own right. I did as commanded and was Teresa ever right? An amazing plethora of diaries and letters were available to me. Once I began reading some of Matilda's diaries, I encountered names I hadn't recognized from my then known family tree. So I went back to the source, H.H. Bancroft's 1890 autobiography. This is the 39th of his volumes on the history of the West called Bancroft's Works. This one is Literary Industries. And in this he discusses how he founded the Bancroft Library. But before that, how he came to California in 1852 and his whole very interesting life story. Here, I discovered that he'd had a first wife. I had not even known that he'd had a first wife and a prior daughter before the four children I had heard about. She had virtually disappeared from the family lore by the time I was grown up. As had Emily's daughter, Kate, and as had Matilda's daughter, Lucy. So why had these women disappeared? Because in all honesty in a family dominated by a patriarchal man, the daughters mattered little when property and power were going to be passed off to the sons. That's not an unfamiliar story from that time. And I beg us all to remember from this time either in places like Afghanistan and Iran. My subsequent investigation created this wonderful opportunity to read these letters and books written in private or semi-private and discover what they reveal about the lives of women, children, families, and communities so long ago. Now when I say H.H. Bancroft was patriarchal, here'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 woman. Constant pressure on the brain, constant tension of the sinews is not for women. Yet he had two wives who wrote prodigiously, conveying substantial information. They described the social realities of their times, what they experienced, including race and class relations. Their feelings when confronting hardships and they had many. The nature of childbirth and childrearing in the late 1800s. What life was like in the still nascent, dune filled city of San Francisco along with travels and travails far beyond the Bay Area. Despite H.H.'s critique of women as professional writers, we know he did encourage Matilda to write about her experiences in these diaries. And because he was an archivist and a publisher, he made sure that both wives' writings were preserved for which I am enormously grateful. How many of us can know in such detail the worlds of our great, great grandmothers or even our mothers? Now we have these two well developed characters from the past who shed light on their strengths as they face the complexities of their lives. So I'll share a little about each one and first poignant M as I think of her. In 1859, H.H. Bancroft had a San Francisco store for selling books and stationery that eventually became the finest on the whole West Coast. But it was still a modest enterprise at the time located on merchant and Montgomery streets where the Transamerica pyramid is today. So imagine this, you're smart, 25 and single, already an old maid in some people's eyes in 1859, and you get the 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, perhaps never to see them again given the risk of travel and life in the pioneer West. Would you do it? The fact that Emily did says a lot about her spirit of adventure and that gumption comes through in her letters. Now, just to understand the travels that it would take even to get from New York to San Francisco, she would come along this blue route, taking a steamer that would bring them to Panama, the Isthmus, take a railroad across the Isthmus and another steamer up that way. And that was actually an easier route because they had the steamer, the railroad in Panama before you had to go by canoe and donkey back. The whole trip took six weeks from New York to San Francisco, and longer if you were going by covered wagon, of course. While on board one of these trips, Emily did return to Buffalo and then came back to San Francisco, and she had her small daughter Kate, about two at that time. And while on board, she wrote to her family about the journey. She said, I see plenty of seasickness as this ship rolls terribly. She is 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, chain and all, I managed to save her. How laconically this mother reports on saving her small daughter from pitching 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 image shows the bay a few years later, much more developed there, San Francisco. Emily's husband, Hubert, wanted her to enjoy the adventure with him. So she went, knowing that she'd suffer one of her perpetual terrible headaches, the kind that lay 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 proposed 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 the fashion until I've taken that trip, I suppose I must. Emily had a no-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 home a letter, disparaging the way women in the city seem to be, quote, so dragged and tired out. I believe it is the hills, they are very tiresome. You can't go anywhere here without toiling up a steep hill somewhere. And when a lady returns from a trip downtown, she is tired most to death. Now, can you imagine holding long dresses like these, some even more voluminous through the muddy streets, no nice sidewalks then. And coming back home to do the repairs on them. Here's an image of one of Emily's letters, hundreds of letters, in how they were bound now located at UC San Diego. There was a volume of letters to her parents and a second volume to her sister. There was a third volume of letters from her parents to her and they were trying so hard to save paper that after they wrote this way on the paper, they would turn it and write crossways and made it almost impossible to read. So if I ever decide to dedicate myself to yet another volume, I have to go back and decipher those letters. Having left her family behind for her husband, Emily did all she could to explain her life so far away. So she wrote these letters and they were saved separately. Realized that in those days, it would take weeks for letters to travel across the country, usually the same route as people did. From San Francisco, South by steamer over the railroad across Panama, up north by steamer to New York. That meant 12 weeks to get a reply from a letter you might have sent, if it was even on time. And if you were reporting something very serious like a pregnancy or an illness or death, you may not hear back until the event is long past. And now with email and texting and instant messenger, we get upset if we haven't gotten a reply the same day or sent one. Emily shared with Hubert a keen 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 showing her own prejudices. In relation to current events of the time, including the Civil War, Emily shared sharp observations. For instance, she pinpointed a secess referring to secessionists. And she had gone on a trip in April 1864 to the then rural farm country of San Jose and stayed with an acquaintance, a white woman who had been recently transplanted from the south. And she showed a kind of laziness as Emily saw it. She wrote to her family, this lady of course has been accustomed to slaves and knew nothing about work until she came out here. So she doesn't manage as farmer's wives do in general. It takes her an hour every morning to bathe and dress herself. So sometimes it is late before she gets the breakfast. Emily also wrote home in April 1865 about her shock at the death of the president. Oddly from a newspaper image, likely this one, she pieced together that in the theater box with Lincoln and his wife was Emily's old friend from Albany, Clara Harris, the fiance of Major Rathbone. Another significant event for San Francisco at the time 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 in San Francisco at the time. Emily sought to bring her family into the moving scene following his death. She wrote, we've heard this morning that Starr King is dead. I could not believe it at first. He was a healthy looking man. I believe his disease was diphtheria. It was a sudden death and much felt in the community as he was very popular. He's been prominent and given many 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, just like today. Emily wrote about what happened to a riverboat that she almost took from Auburn near Sacramento on her return to Oakland, one like this. I was intending to go home Thursday, but Aunt said, stay until Saturday. That boat that went down Thursday night blew up. 40 or 50 lives lost and a great number hurt. Wasn't it a narrow escape? Well, it turned out that life was particularly precarious for Emily because she was harboring a mysterious disease. She reported dozens of headaches. We call them migraines today. Many seemingly induced by eating foods made with cooked or natural sugars. She wrote about trying to find the source of this illness for herself. Why did she have these headaches? Over the years following Kate's birth, Emily lost at least two more babies. This is an 1864 letter labeled private on top. Meaning she didn't want it read aloud as entertainment to the family back home, as so many letters were when there was very little other entertainment. And the interest in life in California was great. Emily had given birth to what she called a fine looking baby girl, fat and healthy, but the baby died within two hours. The reason for Emily's wish for privacy with this letter was because she explained to her mother how she coped following the baby's death. She had asked her husband Hubert to get a little puppy to draw off her mother's milk that was in her engorged's breast. And Emily didn't want other family members to know about this. It was something I'd never heard about myself. By 1868, this is the only photo actually that exists of Emily. By 1868, she was suffering, wasting, debilitating fatigue and blindness. She died pregnant in 1869. The diagnosis was kidney disease. And by the way, after the loss of that baby in 1864, the doctor said, you should not have any more babies. But she continued on. I asked an endocrinologist Dr. Ryan Law at Stanford how to understand the forensic trail of Emily's illness as she described it in her letters. She surmised that Emily likely had diabetes. When he saw this photo, he also noticed what I had not noticed, that Emily had a goiter, you see her thick neck there. So she probably suffered from complications of thyroid problems as well. When Emily died, she left behind her only child, nine-year-old Kate. Here Kate is around five. In his autobiography, H. H. Bancroft 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 disjoin and bury that part of myself. After Emily's death, her husband lapsed into a long depression, though he worked on as ever before. At the time, age 37, he'd begun devoting himself and his resources to collecting everything possible on the Pacific West in what he called his bibliomania. A couple of years later, he found relief from his depression. When a woman friend suggested to him, the next 10 years of your life will be the best. What are you going to do with him? In seeking a renewed purpose for his life, Bancroft decided to make use of his growing collection of Western Americana, which numbered 16,000 items by then. He now hired library assistants who helped research and write what would become Bancroft's works, a history of the Pacific West. He had maps, he had oral histories, he had all kinds of things that they used along with books and pamphlets. Now one thing Bancroft wasn't going to do was remarry. By 1875, he was deeply at work on his histories and 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. Or otherwise, so confound me that I should never be able to complete my labors. However, in Matilda Griffin, my great-great-grandmother, H.H. Bancroft found the perfect match. Matilda was very enthusiastic about her husband's endeavors. Her stories show that she engaged in his intellectual life as much as possible, as writer, traveler, teacher, oral historian, and even business woman. An intriguing aspect of studying these women's letters and journals was realizing they were actually married to two different men in a sense. Emily was married to a bookseller who had begun his collections by the time that she passed away in 1869. He was a businessman. But by 1876, when Matilda married him, Bancroft not only had the book store printing and publishing enterprise on market in seventh streets, but he also had the men on the fifth floor of his building, as he referred to them, where his library then lived. That would have been right up there all was a huge, huge enterprise. They were busily helping write the first of his volumes on the history of the Pacific West called Native Races. Matilda began her writing immediately upon entering her marriage, seemingly at the behest of her husband. She started her first journal in 1876 and later wrote of the couple's travels in 1878. When Matilda left her eight month old baby, Paul, with her in-laws, to spend two months with Mr. Bancroft, as she referred to him, on his collecting journey up north. They traveled as far as Vancouver by steamer and then returned south by rail, ferries, simple wagon, stagecoaches. Matilda's diary captures her thrill at all the new vistas and the many different people she was meeting on this trip. In Vancouver, for example, Victoria, she met Lady Amelia Douglas, the kree wife of the governor of Vancouver, the former governor. Matilda learned about the different ways native women who had intermarried with European trappers and merchants had become integrated into the upper echelons of Canadian society. Matilda also described the perils of traveling rough roads and rivers, including a trip through Oregon's rugged mountains by stagecoach one probably like this. She wrote, while I think of the hardships of the poor immigrants 20 or 30 years ago, I hesitate to write complainingly of our ride out here. As we started, the driver remarked to me that we would go down a pass that was as bad as any in the Rocky Mountains. And that it was going down into the bowels of the earth. She noted drolly how the driver seemed to enjoy making the voyage seem even more dangerous and frightening by remarking that his wife, his horse, would easily shy. She wrote, it would get awful scared, said he. And his collar don't fit correctly, so it might slip off. I mildly suggested, but your break will be your dependence. No, he replied, that's no good. I told him today, twidnt hold and ought to be fixed before we started. Matilda concluded Riley, I think our driver wanted to impress us with his skill in conquering great difficulties. Matilda wrote five other journals, including one for each of her four children, begun at their births and continuing through the first 10 years of their lives. Accounts of the cute things they'd say and do, what they studied under her tutelage because they were mostly homeschooled. And the mischief they got into, and with three boys, it was phenomenal, 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. When Matilda finally consulted an expert doctor, she wrote, he was very much interested in the sketch I was able to give him of Philip's condition from his babyhood. I made it out from this journal, which he said was a remarkable diagnosis for a layman. Who would keep such a record but a mother? Matilda also recorded the varied remedies prescribed for her children's ailments, and you may have tried some of these with children in your life. Brandy, wine, electricity, arsenic, laudanum, and cocaine, different times. For all 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. That means she was keeping these four detailed journals simultaneously, amounting to hundreds of pages each for many years. I dare not ask how many of us have kept such journals for our children or even ourselves. Matilda, in one of her other roles, was a property manager of sorts for the family. Since both Philip and H.H. were prone 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 to start a farm. H.H. wrote to his wife that she was making a quote unquote, very good farm superintendent. You see Lucy writing out there. Philip eventually inherited that farm. His daughter-in-law Ruth Bancroft developed several acres into an amazing succulent garden, which remains today the gorgeous Ruth Bancroft garden. 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 Bancroft's entire store burned down and that smoke is his store. Fortunately, he'd already moved his library to a fire safe location south of San Francisco, way outside of San Francisco on Army and Valencia streets. In the aftermath of this disaster, H.H. wrote to Matilda about his concern for the 300 workers for whom he forged ahead in rebuilding in order to keep them in work. But he also wanted to alleviate her worries. 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 have wanted to burden him with her own feelings and troubles, yet he recognized that she had them. Years later, at the time of the 1906 earthquake, the family had a building in San Francisco comprised of small apartments called St. Dunstan's, located at Sutter and Venice. It's spectacular ruins resulting from the earthquake and subsequent fire were captured in this photo to the right. Matilda had written many letters to her then older sons about developing clientele and creating a cultural mecca of sorts for visitors and renters when the properties they held were available to others. We should note that in that same earthquake, the San Francisco Public Library lost 80% of its original holdings. Matilda was a very forward-thinking woman, a dreamer and schemer of sorts for the good. The family sought to sell another farm property they had had outside of San Diego when they kept going further and further south to drier climates. This one was called Helix Farms. Matilda schemed to make it into a sanitarium or kind of refuge for the urban poor after listening to a lecture from Jacob Rees in 1890 on his book, How the Other Half Lives, which is an indicting depiction of slum conditions at the turn of the century. In 1905, Matilda explained to her son, Griffin, her scheme to convert this farm into a beneficial social project. She wrote, I have 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 and 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 that I really feel. I asked him if he wouldn't come out to California and fathered the plan, give the project his support and so make 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 sons and husband 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, while in Vancouver, Matilda learned the art of being an oral historian when she began writing down the reminiscences of Reverend John Good, 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. Good. 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 are themselves remarkable. His oral history is lodged in the Bancroft Library now. From his stories, Matilda learned, among other things, about the struggles of First Nations peoples there on what became Vancouver Island and how they had suffered so terribly from invasion, poverty, and disease. Two years later in 1880, Matilda played a crucial role as an oral historian in capturing the dictations of Latter-day Saints women in Utah. Here is one, Jane Snyder Richards, the first wife of one of the elders of the church. It would have been improper for a Gentile man to ask personal questions about the family lives of these women, but Matilda elicited from her interviewees fascinating information about the plight of the Mormon people uprooted and often chased out violently from Eastern homes and then pushed further and further west. The women in these oral histories revealed the conundrums they experienced when their husband sought to take another wife. Matilda captured how these speakers were able to reconcile through their faith the nature of plural marriage. She listened with seeming objectivity to a perspective on polygamy that she probably did not agree with but gave her interviewees all due respect. In Matilda's interview with Jane Snyder Richards, 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 into 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 brother-in-law's death, I gave my sister to my husband as a wife. Now, we were able to do much more for her comfort. It wasn't easy at all. Matilda also captured the sometimes painful details of entering a plural marriage such as these lines she wrote about Jane from a separate interview. When the subject of polygamy was first talked up 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 as she had feared when she was first tested. These stories about the sister wives are truly amazing. I'll mention one last important role that Matilda played regarding her help getting H.H. Bancroft's library sold to UC Berkeley. Here it is, not surrounded by any buildings, a brick structure that saved his library when that terrible fire happened. H.H. Bancroft actually gave his wife credit for her contributions to the sale of the library for she herself had gone out to meet UC administrators and faculty in order to convince them of the value of her husband's collection. Yes, he had old newspapers and maps and pamphlets but it wasn't all trash, it was very valuable and she had the idea to enhance how his collection might help future generations. Indeed it does. In September 1905, in a letter to his son Griffin, H.H. exhorted him to work as hard as his mother had and he said, as an example of his wife's 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 when that terrible earthquake devastated San Francisco, Bancroft's library was safe at the southern edge and in May, one month later, its contents were ferried across the bay to UC Berkeley. Here is Matilda with my grandfather around 1909. Sadly in 1910, Matilda Bancroft died relatively young at age 62 of Angina, a heart attack. Her husband was already 78 and he'd live another eight years. H.H. was described in his earlier life as a man of tremendous strength and energy which empowered his grand visions and projects. I think he may have just tuckered out his wife who was small of stature and who had hinted in her own writings about some of her own internal ailments but Matilda was huge of heart and ambition herself and now we have her words to prove it. Now you can find out a little more information about my talks, some of them will be different from each other and my blog in which I encourage everyone to capture our stories and dig through archives. On a couple of the blogs I've already written, I wrote in particular about a wonderful man named Daryl Babe Wilson and his contributions to this earth by sharing his memoir and Malcolm Margolin who also I was able to collect some of his stories. So I end with this great energy for asking everybody to go out and save your stories, save each other's stories and figure out what you can do with the old letters and archives that will be of value at some point. Thank you so much. And I believe we have time for questions if anybody has any. And it's so nice to see so many of you here and Greg. As I told you earlier, I had never read journals or letters but your book is fascinating and beautifully written and made me interested in these people. And I guess I just wanna know how did you go about doing that Is that the type of reading that you would do and you kind of had the idea that you had to introduce these things? I mean, how did you write it in this form? Well, I will actually on, and you'll see on my website on the events page, there's a round table that anybody can access via Zoom on April, I think 11th at the Bancroft Library and it's titled Out of the Archives and Into a Narrative so I will focus on that all then but I will give you a little hint. Basically when Teresa ordered me into the library to read these works, I had no idea what was going to come of them and I ended up, as I was reading them, I was of course personally interested and then I had to go to San Diego and read Emily's letters that are all there. And then I just started typing, I just transcribed because you can only read them in the library and I transcribed and transcribed and after a very long time of collecting these stories, I thought, well, would anybody else be interested in reading these stories and if so, how will I make sense of them? And I didn't want to just present them in chronological order. Emily in particular, she would write, she'd start at the top and say Tuesday and write maybe two paragraphs and she'd say, my husband's coming home, I need to get dinner fixed and then it would be Wednesday. She called them journals because she would try to write every day but it would be a little perhaps chaotic to show just that chronological order. So I thought, I want to help make sense of this by putting together the information as I did in the chapter. So Emily and her life and the family life and the other people that they knew and then their travels. So I picked themes that looked like they could go together and then as I was writing them they clearly needed some elucidation regarding some of the people she referred to and or the events and what they might mean that we wouldn't really know about in the, from the 1860s. That helps. So you and I are cousins. My great-great grandfather was A.L. Benton. Oh, what's your name? My name is Kim also, Kimberly. Yeah, so it's, and this is my granddaughter. So we're, I think, seven generations I counted. We're debating whether it's seven or eight. So gosh, it's wonderful to be here and listen. You know, I've grown up, we have a lot of HH's works at her house that my mom collected. Great. Who was your mother? So my mother was Suzanne Gerard Bancroft. So there was, Albert had, I think, five children. My great-grandmother was Alberta Bancroft, Reed, and then she had one daughter who was my grandmother, Francis and Reed. So, yeah. Well, I'm gonna see if I can go back to, so my aunt, as luck would have it, she lives here in the city and she saw that you were speaking today and sent it to her, like, oh, well, let's go because we both live in Oakland, so. Oh, great. Well, I'm trying to go back to, I think you came in a little late. We did, we were having a horrible time finding parking. And so at the very beginning. Right? I know, I'm dressed for St. Patrick's Day. Oh, right. I did not know it was happening. I didn't either. Because we didn't celebrate it back in my day. Yeah. But I did show at the very beginning this family tree and it was even more complicated. I have other versions and so there is actually the man she's talking about, Albert Little. Yes. So Ashley, Azariah Ashley and Lucy Howe were the progenitors and they had these children and there's Albert Little. Actually, this one passed away in two years and they named the next boy after him as well, which I don't know if you knew that. Yes. So I have been in touch with other relatives. So we'll be in touch. AL actually was very important and HH Bancroft made sure to employ and also house as many of his relatives as he could. But he had a falling out with AL that became very famous. After the store burned down in 1886, apparently his brother was running at AL. And for some reason in this family, everybody called each other by their initials HH and AL and there's a WW. And so apparently the insurance that AL was supposed to have on the building wasn't sufficient and HH became somewhat curmudgeonly in his latter years and held that against him. Yes. But we still love each other through the generations. To heck with that. And I think the sister in law was running a farm in Walnut Creek. Yes. Their farm apparently and so there was something. They had the story I was told and this is part of it. You go back and ask those questions while you still can. The HH women were on one side of a fence and the AL were on the other. And when the two men would leave, the women would get together like, to heck with you, we're going to still enjoy each other's company. I wanted to ask you about people who are current like diarists and journal writers. Like that you can say a lot of this because the people are like not alive. And there's a lot of secrets in families and not the total secrets, but they're not talked about. Like I mean, I'm not my family's Catholic, right? We have suicide, abortion, pedophilia, incarceration. Endless list of things that are not talked about in my family and everything. So do you encourage people who want to tell stories to like fictionalize it or how do you do truth telling and protect the guilty or not be indicted or something? And protect the innocent who might be affected as well. Well, for example, I showed that one letter that was labeled private and Emily's one of her descendants that would have cared most about it, who's 90. I went to her and I said, I'd like to publish this in the book. And she was actually against the fact that that letter had even been collected and put in all of the letters that Emily had because she had written in that letter about having had to use a puppy to draw off her mother's milk after her baby died. And so I asked her permission. I said, may I put this in the book? And she said, well, I don't know. And then she thought about it and realized, well, that's an important fact to understand about how women coped after the death of an infant, which was very frequent. Emily lost another baby after that. So I think first, if there's permission that can be gained and then to the extent that it's a valuable story that teaches us something but would harm somebody, including an innocent person whose story is being revealed, harm done against them, then it is important to get permission. And that's been true in other memoirs I've worked on with people who don't necessarily want their community or family's dirty laundry out in the public. So I mean, Mark Twain, I think he put 100 year moratorium on anybody publishing his letters to protect people. So that's another way of doing it, saying I don't want this to be known for another 25 years if whoever is going to inherit that material. I don't know if that helps. But I think the most important thing is to write one's truth and then figure out how you need to protect people. Because expressing that truth is so valuable. Thank you. I just want to echo what you said about it being a wonderfully written book. And Kim, everything you've written in there is so graceful and powerful. And that's also true for your ancestors. And I'm just so struck by the very high quality of expressiveness with both women. And I'm wondering, does that reflect just a advanced level of literacy among women of that class in that day? Or are they just particularly evocative writers in the family? I would say probably a little bit of both. I mean, for one thing, they didn't have all of the entertainment, again, that we have now. So we can let ourselves drift off into movies, and TV, and all kinds of other things. They had books. And if H.H. Badcroft was trying to sell 39 of these books, and you got them and you read them, their language in some ways, their vocabulary more advanced than what we typically use. I mean, even Matilda talked about sitting with Reverend Good and the wonderful assiduity. I mean, how often do we use that word these days? We don't. And so I think that was part of what was the world of reading that they engaged in. And neither of these women were highly educated. Emily went to a girl's school, a boarding school, Miss Porter's, which still exists. And when I was looking up what she was studying, I mean, they had physiology, chemistry, trigonometry, things I didn't take in high school. And Matilda, I couldn't find any records of where she had gone to school. Neither had gone to college. But there was this sense also in them of being autodidacts. They wanted to read. They wanted to learn. And they pushed themselves. So I have a whole list of the books that they each talked about reading. And so that was important to them. All right. Thank you, Kim. That was a really wonderful presentation. We appreciate it. And we appreciate you all being here today. There are books for sale over here. And thank you again. And pick up an ATL for all of the other upcoming program. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Kim.