by LaRae Free Kerr

Young Dollie Wadsworth walked to the polling booth with her husband, where she proudly cast her ballot, knowing she was making history, even in her isolated Nevada community. It was 1920. Warren Harding was elected with 76% of the votes. But in hindsight, that wasn’t the big news. The big news was that women voted in national elections for the first time.

The women in both Utah Territory and Wyoming Territory were voting by 1870, though no states gave the vote to women that early. Abigail Adams had asked her husband, John, many years earlier to “remember the women.” But it took until 1920 before Dollie and other women could march up to the polls, cast a vote and have it count!

Even so, it took another sixty years before women’s lives were deemed worthy of historical recording. As a high school student, how shocked I was, when I realized that all the history I had learned in my most excellent schooling experience concentrated on presidents, kings, rulers, inventors (male), scientists (male), wars, and armies. In short, the history deemed important enough to teach concentrated on men’s activities.

Consequently, when the opportunity to attend the first Coalition for Western Women’s History in Sun Valley, Idaho came my way in 1983, I jumped at it. The coalition didn’t last long; it didn’t need to (See http://www.westernwomenshistory.org/). But some great materials on women’s lives came out of that decade, 1980-1990, partly because of this coalition, which showed clearly that women’s lives and activities were important to the world.

Even though many of 1980-1990’s books and bibliographies were written and compiled especially to include women in history, the hard facts came from women’s journals, diaries, and reminiscences.
Scholars trolled the card catalogs of university and historical society manuscripts, excerpting bits from various women’s writings.

To genealogists, this means that decade produced at least two ways to find female ancestors. One is to search bibliographies and books combining the experiences of many women. If an ancestor is mentioned in any of those books, go to the originals. The second is to troll scholarly manuscript collections yourselves.

Be sure to look at all the information on the coalition site given above. Perhaps my favorite book based on multiple histories is Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier by Joanna L. Stratton. If your relative is mentioned in this book, you know there is more about her. A similar book was written using Mormon women’s diaries housed in the library at Idaho State University in Pocatello – one of my alma maters.

Many bibliographies can be found at H-Women Bibliographies at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~women/bibs/. Two other good bibliographies are Women in the West: A Bibliography 1984-1987 published by the Coalition for Western Women’s History in 1988, compiled by Teri W. Conrad; and A Preliminary Union Catalog of Nevada Manuscripts, compiled by Robert D. Armstrong which lists some women’s works such as Caroline L. Richardson’s journal of an overland trip from Illinois to California via the Humboldt River.

Other compilations of histories include Women of the West by Cathy Luchette; The Old West: The Women by Time-Life; and Women and Men on the Overland Trail by John Mack Farragher. Many women from all over the West are mentioned in The Women’s West Teaching Guide: Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century American West, another Coalition for Western Women’s History publication, edited and written by Melissa Hield and Martha Boethel. Check libraries and GoogleBooks for more.

In addition to searching the books and bibliographies mentioned above for your female ancestors, I suggest a quick tour of “nukmuk,” the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) at www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc or http://www2.lib.udel.edu/database/nucmc.html. Visit
http://www.library.yale.edu/mssa/tutorial/nucmc.htm to learn how to use NUCMC. For more about
NUCMC, read “A Tale of Three Archives” at Itsallrelatives.us.

Great stuff can be found through NUCMC: papers including Elvira Johnson Perkins, Sarah Gilbert White Smith and other Oregon pioneers can be found at Yale University. If Elvira were your Oregon relative, would you have searched Yale manuscripts? NUCMC directs researchers to the right place.

For more western manuscripts visit the Rocky Mountain Online Archive at (http://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?inst=NmU&docId=/published/nmu1mss773sc.xml). This site includes American Indian oral histories plus so much more. Search creatively, use place names, religions and topics as well as family names.

Of course, visits to the university and community libraries nearest your ancestors’ home towns, and to state and local Historical Societies and museums can also lead to manuscripts about your ancestors. If nearby libraries yield nothing, look further afield. Sometimes manuscripts end up in repositories near where the inheritor of the manuscript lived, rather than where the ancestor lived.

The truth is that many pioneer women kept diaries and journals, many of which have – thank heavens – found their way to libraries and museums. Like Dollie going to the polls so her vote would count, researchers have to go to the repositories to find these records. Hopefully, the bibliographies, historical compilations, NUCMC and other suggestions will aid you in finding your ancestors’ records.

LaRae Free Kerr, M ED, can be reached at Itsallrelatives.net and Itsallrelatives@sfcn.org.