Mary Briggs: A Common Life

The World Outside Mary's Farm This is very close to the title of one of the chapters in the book but the theme actually runs throughout the book in other chapters. One of the things that intrigued me in researching was the backdrop of what else was going on while Mary wrote about the harvest or visiting family or planting her garden. Long before I started writing the book, when I was still doing general research and trying to get the diary entries in their proper place, I explored events happening on the national or global stage. For much of the diary time period, I could find "year in review" articles in newspapers where they would recap their major stories of the year. A lot of these tended to be where one group was warring with another group, political leaders who died or were elected or deposed, celebrities who did something notable, etc. But they also included scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in medicine, records broken, or big news in human interest topics. I ...

Digging into the Past: Researching the Diary When I first started researching the diary entries, I had this idea to see how much information I could find without leaving my house or paying anything. With the internet, there is an amazing amount of info available but it didn't take me long to give up on my initial plan! So, how did I find the information I put into the book? Talking with Family I'm descended from Mary on my father's side. At the time I started researching (sometime in 2017), Dad was still alive. He was born in 1929, after Mary died in 1922, so he never knew her but he did know some of her children and their children and he attended many Mosher and Briggs family reunions. Sometimes I would be visiting him and we'd start talking about what I was digging into for the book. He would think back about something he remembered. Then he would call his first cousin, Eldon Stall, and the two of them would reminisce and compare memories on speaker phone while I took...

Additional Material: Getting Around chapter, Trains In the "Getting Around" chapter of the book, the "Trains" sections talks about a couple of major train trips that Mary took during the time she kept her diary. For the trip to visit her daughter and son-in-law in South Dakota, 1906, she detailed in her diary the times she caught trains at which stations.  What I wrote about that journey in the book is as follows: Based on train schedules published 1907 – 1908, Grimes to Des Moines took roughly 25 minutes; she arrived around 1 am. She waited until 1:30 am to leave for Madrid. Des Moines to Madrid was 1:25 travel time. Then, she had about an hour’s wait until 4 am for her next train. The Madrid to Sioux City trip took about six hours, with a 20-minute layover in Manilla. Sioux City to Mitchell took 5:25. Mitchell to Chamberlain, where she spent the night, was another 2:45. The following day, the train to Presho took 1:50. All of that together makes about 18 hours of ...

 A Common Life: A Voice from the Progressive Era I'm excited to announce the publication of my new book A Common Life: A Voice from the Progressive Era on September 28, 2022! This blog will tell some of the stories that didn't make into the book, background on the diary, and other topics related to A Common Life . Based on diary kept by Mary Ann Mosher Briggs (my great-great-grandmother) from 1888 until she died in 1922, the book looks beyond the diary entries she wrote. It digs into the people, places, and events behind her words and what was going on in the world outside her farm in Dallas County, Iowa at the time. The context helps mo re-fully illuminate her life, the one she referred to in her first diary entry with "it is but a common life."  The diary years almost perfectly overlap what we now call "The Progressive Era," a time of massive changes in technology and society. Her diary gives a first-person account of some of those changes and how they in...