In 1982, when my Great-Aunt Alice died, the few personal belongings she had in the nursing home came to me. Among them were a couple of pieces of jewelry, a photo album and some larger loose photos, her art portfolio from when she was drawing in the 1940s and 50s, and her father’s collection of writings. Her father was a writer and a sports reporter for the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper during the post-Civil War days through the late 1800s. The story of her father and mother I’ll save for another blog, but I’ll tease you with this: His writings include several semi-pornographic poems circa 1877. Yup, there’s really nothing new under the sun, is there?
When the Meehan branch of my family—my mom’s side—had a Cousins Reunion about fifteen years ago, I dug out the photos from Aunt Alice and brought them with me. They were a treasure trove of family history, except that many of them were unlabeled. Unless someone recognized the folks in the pictures, we had no idea who we were seeing. After looking at dozens of old pictures, dating back as far the 1860s, I began to understand how some family pictures end up in antiques stores. When you’re cleaning out your grandmother’s house of fifty or sixty years of clutter, and there are no names to attach to photos, perhaps it is easier to just abandon them. Thankfully, we didn’t do that.
One of the unlabeled, rather tattered pictures became known as the “mystery photo” and all the cousins took a turn examining it, comparing it to known pictures of ancestors, and peering at it endlessly with the magnifying glass. The photo has five young women, dressed in what appears to be wedding garb—long lacy dresses, headpieces with veils—a photo expert dated it somewhere between 1900 and 1920.
I’m fairly sure that I know who two of the women are: One is my Great-Aunt Alice (upper right) and one is my Great-Aunt Ruth (upper left). Alice, we verified with a known photo of her taken at roughly the same time where she’s wearing the same necklace she has on in the group shot. We did the same with Great-Aunt Ruth, although she’s very distinctive looking anyway. The one sitting on the cushion down in the front could be my grandmother, also named Ruth, but when she was very young. That young girl looks remarkably like my own mother when she was in her early teens.
We still have no clue who the others in the photo are or what the event is—we’ve considered that it might be a wedding since they’re all dressed in fancy clothes and carrying flowers. We also thought maybe it was a Job’s Daughters photo or a Sunday School class or a graduation. We seriously have no idea, but we’re kinda going with wedding idea.
But whose wedding? Which young woman is the bride? The one sitting on the settee on the right seems to have a fancier dress and her flowers look more like a bouquet and not a basket like the others—is she the bride? If so, why isn’t she front and center? The ancestor she looks most like is Great-Aunt Emma, but we don’t believe she’d have had such a fancy wedding. This appears to be a really extravagant affair with four bridesmaids in pretty snazzy dresses. Honestly, no one in our family could’ve afforded a big fancy wedding, so at this point, it remains a mystery.
I’ll continue to research this photo, as well as several others that we pondered over during Cousins Reunion–I’ll keep you posted if I find out anything new about these lovely ladies. Do any of you have any mystery photos? Pictures with no information written on the back? People you have zero idea who the folks are? Tell all!
We chose the hills of southern Indiana again, but this trip, we booked four nights at an inn in New Harmony, Indiana. Neither of us had ever been there before, so we were taking a chance, but the website looked good and the history looked downright fascinating.
The thing we noticed most about our stay in New Harmony was how incredibly peaceful the town was—the quiet, which could’ve been disconcerting, was actually extraordinary. We wandered–oh, how we wandered! All through an old hilly cemetery, through the spectacular cathedral labyrinth, past home after restored home, and into a lovely old church that remains open twenty-four hours. The beautiful magnolia trees, the spring flowers, the friendly folks we met while walking, the labyrinths and museums, even the restaurants exuded the harmony and peace that was the cornerstone of the town in the early nineteenth century.
FYI: Make It Real, book 2 in my Walkers of River’s Edge series is still on sale for just 99 cents, but only for a few more days! If you haven’t been to River’s Edge yet, now’s your chance. More sweet, small town romance in beautiful southern Indiana!
I don’t write historical western romance, I write contemporary romance. But, I was curious about women’s roles in the Old West, particularly seasoned women, and how that compares to women’s roles on ranches and cattle spreads today.
Contemporary Western women of all ages fight just as fiercely and work just as hard as their nineteenth-century counterparts, although with a bit more assistance from modern technology. Wells are drilled now with machinery instead of dug by hand, fences are electrified, but they still have to be repaired, tractors beat hand plows all to heck, and 4-wheel-drivetrucks and Gators make getting around the vast acres much easier and faster. Cows still need hay, and calves still need to be birthed but computers make ranch organization much easier. Access to modern medicine, ambulances, and hospitals make live spans much longer; and although most ranch women grow big gardens even today, grocery stores make produce and dairy more readily available.
Today’s ranch women have different challenges than their nineteenth-century sisters, but the goal is the same—to make a success of the family farms and cattle spreads. When I write my contemporary heroines, I try hard to show spunky, tough ladies who can rope a cow, wrangle a herd of horses, and help birth a calf. But they’re also smart, fun, flirty women who can handle the ranch books, dance with skirts a swirlin’, and charm a cowboy right to his knees.
The Winners of a
This one was a little bit of a departure for me—I’ve never used the enemies-to-lovers trope before. Mostly, I think because I really hate confrontation. I mean seriously hate it. I’ll go out of my way to avoid a confrontation in my real life, so writing a story based on one was a little uncomfortable.
It’s an enemies to lovers showdown between the cowboy who can’t trust and the cowgirl who won’t forgive.
Confession? I don’t know any real cowboys. I’ve read about them in the novels that my fellow western romance authors write; I’ve watched myriad TV westerns both new and old and rodeo videos galore. We had horses for fifteen years, so I’ve met lots of horsemen, some may even have thought of themselves as cowboys, some sure acted as if they thought they were. But a cattle drive in Montana is very different from riding the horse trails in a state park in the Midwest.
But as I learned more and more about cowboys, I discovered that “alpha” didn’t really define the cowboy heroes I was reading about and watching. The swaggering stereotypical cowboy I’d always imagined was so far off the mark that I was actually shocked … and delighted. That quiet strength, that determination that I’d written into my beta winemakers, veterinarians, carpenters, college professors, and chefs were also hallmarks of the cowboy persona. When I created bronc rider Del Foster and rodeo cutting champion Bo Kennedy, those qualities—gentleness, intelligence, supportiveness, loyalty, steadiness, awareness of their own emotions as well as others—were all things my cowboys could be … and are.
The Cowboy’s Comeback
I was on a writer retreat with my bestie, Liz Flaherty a couple of weeks ago. It was fabulous. We wrote, we drank wine, we ate chocolate, we talked, we processed her book and mine. Our retreats are always as Liz puts it,
We talked about the little pieces of ideas that wander through our writer minds—snippets of conversations, words, things we notice that perhaps no one else notices. We share ideas about settings, even as minute as the furnishings in a specific house in a setting. That got me thinking about where my random ideas rest in my imagination—on a chintz chair, I think. Faded old flowered fabric on a huge overstuffed chair sitting in a sunny spot under the eaves. Maybe there’s an ottoman, but it doesn’t have to match because honestly, my decorating style, like my writing style, is as random as my ideas. So why would I imagine something that matches?
Everyone has word pictures in their minds—and often it takes just seeing a pair of fancy cowboy boots in a store in West Yellowstone, Montana, or a rusty pump on a ranch in Virginia City for a story to start to happen.
