More and more people are now getting interested in conducting a family history search. After all, current tools make it much easier and are more effective than the old methods people used some twenty years ago. But let’s get right into the main topic: family history. Needless to say, many of those who research their family tree want to know where their relatives came from, understand social history, and simply resolve unanswered family questions. Thankfully, it’s all possible these days.

Did you also know that 70% of Americans, according to an Ipsos poll, think that it’s essential to know family history? However, despite this, only 33% have conducted online genealogy research.

Imagine how exciting it is to know where your great-grandmother came from or what your great-uncle did for a living. While it’s not too easy to find out, it’s still possible with the current resources, with some being completely free.

So, are you curious to know what your ancestors were up to? Read the tips in this blog post.

Ways to Conduct a Family History Search

Below you’ll discover family history search options and find answers to your ancestry questions.

Start with the Things You Already Know

If you have any historical documents, such as death certificates, marriage documents, or something of this kind at your place, go through them to trace any important information. In documents of this kind, you’ll likely find your relatives’ full names, birth and death dates, and locations where they lived.

The time period during which your ancestors lived can help you learn more about their lifestyle. For instance, if your great-grandmother lived from 1930 to 2000, that means she lived during the Great Depression, the World War II, and the Cold War, which gives you an idea of what her life was like.

Ask Your Family Members for Help

Being independent in your family search won’t get you far. Your relatives, such as a grandmother, a grandfather, or even your parents, may know more than you think they do. If you think there are relatives you don’t know about who could help you out in your research, use Native American Netroots, a people search site that gets its information from public records. There, you can find your relatives, their phone numbers, emails, addresses, and other additional information.

Ask them about migrations, occupations, and any family stories to document the most essential facts. They may also give you photographs, letters, or any documents that will connect you to the truth.

For example, knowing where your ancestors worked can give away much about their lives. Again, let’s take the example of the great-grandmother who lived from 1930 to 2000. She could work as a secretary, telephone operator, nurse or teacher, or she could hold a government job, be a factory worker, or even be a housewife. Depending on the role she had, you’ll find it easier to figure out her approximate pay and the lifestyle she could afford.

Use Historical Records

This is where a serious genealogical search begins. By using historical records, we mean checking census records, birth, marriage, and death certificates, church registries, military records, or land ownership documents. Parish registers are also valuable sources for this kind of information.

These records can reveal a lot of details about your relatives, including their marital status, date and cause of death, number of children, religious affiliation, and whether they served in the armed forces, among other things.

But where does one access these records? National archives, state and county offices, churches, historical newspapers, and libraries are some of the examples. Some of them may have online records depending on the state and county where you live.

Make a Working Hypothesis

After having searched multiple resources, family historians recommend collecting all the information in one place. For example:

Morgan Elizabeth was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1930. Her parents were Robert Elizabeth and Mary Elizabeth. In 1950, Morgan got married to a man named Edward Griffiths. They had 3 children together. In 1965, they moved to Los Angeles, California, where Morgan worked as a nurse and Edward worked in the government. Morgan died in 1995, while Edward died in 2000.

This working hypothesis will help you organize the information chronologically.

Let’s Recap

Millions of people wish they could get closer to their family history. It’s a connection between the past and present, a story that unites people who are here and those who have long left. While this process may take time, it’s eventually worth it. Who wouldn’t want to know the details about their relatives and the events that happened in their lives?

A collection of online and offline tools can help you in this process. For a more effective search, collaborate with your family members to get the material you may not know about.

The theme for 2019’s LauraPalooza conference is All Roads Lead to Laura. This conference celebrates the legacy of the “Little House” series which began in Pepin, Wisconsin in 1867 with Laura’s birth. Another conference highlight includes an exclusive tour of the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum and special picnic lunch at the replica wayside cabin, birth site of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

“We are excited to bring LauraPalooza 2019 to the Badger state, the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder and it’s going to be our best conference yet,” said Barb Mayes Boustead, president of the LIWLRA. Boustead notes that with its unique mix of academic and fan offerings, LauraPalooza is a truly singular event—a uniqueness embodied by its cheeky name and welcoming atmosphere.

Does it have to be over?  I would rather it not.  Every time I picked up Prairie Fires I was engaged and interested, much like I am with the Little House books. 

Caroline Fraser mentions the golden thread that runs through the books.  It runs through us too, the people captured by these pioneer tales. Those of us whose devotion to Laura’s legacy brings us to the Laurapalooza conference biannually, which Caroline kindly mentions in her epilogue. 

She gives mention to the homesites, which we yearn to visit, and upon each return, it feels somewhat like a pilgrimage.   

She wants us to remember that Laura was a REAL person.  There was a fictional Laura, and a dozen different versions of the walking talking breathing human, who navigated through nine decades of life.  

The daughter, wife, mother, club woman, farmer, housekeeper, traveler, friend, and  writer, who didn’t always wildly succeed in all her endeavors.  She was unfailingly human, just like the rest of us. She lived a simple life, a life of hardship and struggle, grief and triumph.  It was her observations of those that resonates with her readers.  

Sorry Television show fans, but Caroline concludes, and I concur, that the Little House world belongs to the readers.  We can read the stories over and over, never tiring of them, and every tidbit of factual info we can glean about the real people standing behind the book characters seems like gold.  

I wish Laura could have commented in the epilogue of Prairie Fires.  Would she have corrected any errors or misconceptions?  Errors in her fiction never bothered her.  She could have shared how it felt to have her memory memorialized  with a Pulitzer  prize winning biography.  

I would like to think she would be proud that she had such an impact on so many.    

Caroline deserves all the accolades she has won.  Her research is painstaking and inspiring to those of us touched by her work.  With a nod to Kevin Pearce’s observation of Caroline’s vocabulary, I will point out three new words I had to look up when reading the epilogue. 

1. Jeremiad – Definition: a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes decrying the downfall of morality or society

“Lane wanted to tie the books ever closer to the American jeremiad that she and Isabel Patterson and Ayn Rand had preached.”

*Oh Rose, I guess so.  

2.  Nostrum – Definition: a pet scheme or favorite remedy, especially one for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement.  An ineffective medicine prepared by an unqualified person.  

“The nostrum is treated as if it constitutes a commandment: “ It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with the simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.   

“during tough times, populist nostrums gain favor”

*Not sure I agree.  I suspect Laura was just sharing a bit of wisdom she gleaned over decades of surviving the perils in her lifetime.  

3.  Monoculture – Definition: the cultivation of a single crop in a given area.

“Monoculture has always been with us, and it has always been the model that pays.”

“the replacement of natural forest with pine monoculture”

 *Things we wish were not so, but they are.  

Years ago, while on a mother daughter trip to DeSmet, we were browsing through the newly opened museum in the Memorial Society, and we came across a dress form wearing a nightgown. As I gazed at it ruffly whiteness, I could not help but wonder what Laura would have thought of her devotees viewing her nightwear.  Would she chuckle? Be horrified?  Wonder at our sanity?  One can only imagine.  

Speaking as one of the faithful:  anything at all, Laura, anything at all.  Thank you.  

This chapter enlightens the reader to the pride and care that Irene Lichty and Seals took in trying to make the home in Mansfield a museum and form the LIW Home Association. At RWL urging, the Seals, sold some of the furniture and household items, given to them in the will of LIW, to Home Association for $1. The literary property rights, which were cut and dried, laid out in the will of LIW, became a messy affair. In the said will, LIW gave the rights and the income to RWL and then upon Rose’s death, it was to transfer to the LIW Library in Mansfield. However after her death, George Bye died a few short months later and a feud erupted between the Brown Company (who had purchased the Bye agency) and Lane, along with her “adopted grandson”, Roger MacBride.

The royalties from the books made Rose well off for the first time in her life. The books were going through many printings here at home and all over the world. It turns out children from other countries were just as fascinated with the Ingalls family and their adventures as the Americans were. During this time Rose, turned MacBride into her political pawn. Rose also added to the cannon of the Little House work, by publishing, On The Way Home.

After Lane’s death in 1968 MacBride became the heir of the literary works, as Lane had renewed the copyrights of the Little House books in her name. By 1974 he had transferred the copyrights of all of LIW books and anything posthumously published in her name to him. This includes The First Four Years, which was first published in 1971. As we all know, TFFY, was the adult version of the early years of the Wilder’s marriage. It was not written with children in mind. It was a dark, adult version of the tragedies that befell the Wilders.

In 1971 Ed Friendly and MacBride began discussions to bring LHOTP to television. After MacBride optioned the rights to Friendly, he hired a writer to create a two hour movie based on the LHOTP book to be used as a backdoor pilot for the show. Michael Landon, of Bonanza fame, was immediately hired to produce, direct and star in the show. The show did not stay true to the meat of the books and often tackled subject matter not covered in the books and adding characters to the larger story. This confused some readers of the books, but it also increased book sales during the nine year run of the series. To this day it remains in syndication and can be seen multiple times a day on television.

MacBride also added to the cannon of the Little House books by adding books about Rose after the move to Missouri. He died unexpectedly before the completion of these books. A legal battle between his estate and the Library that was supposed to benefit from the literary works of LIW, per her will, ensued. It was settled out of court for a lump sum and MacBride’s estate retained the copyrights.

Obviously all of these events shaped how we see ‘Little House’ today. If you are a lover of the television show, a book purist or fall somewhere in the middle, I think it is important to remember how all the pieces have come together to unite people from all over the world and connect them to Laura Ingalls Wilder. As our conference motto this year, All Roads Lead to Laura, we will learn more about this topic. I’m sure lively discussion will ensure on this post and at the conference. As I reflect on my youth, does it matter how one became a fan of Laura? In the end we are all blessed because of her and we each are tasked to promote her legacy to the next generation.

Covering the Wilder’s final two decades, Fraser balances how the author’s professional life was winding down, while simultaneously exploring how the Little House series had started taking on a life of its own, receiving accolades from librarians, schools and readers both in the United States and around the world; as well as the updated 1950s editions illustrated by Garth Williams. As well as Wilder’s decision to not continue writing because—perhaps—she didn’t want to revisit those first four years of marriage, leaving Almanzo and Laura on the precipice of a beautiful world.

“Sunshine and shadow” could also be this period of reflection in Wilder’s personal life. On one hand Wilder’s relationship with Rose continued to be complicated, while on the other, the author enjoyed her retirement, choosing to stay close to home to be with Almanzo, whose health was failing. Wilder’s younger sisters—Grace and Carrie—also died before she did, keeping in the theme of her being the one left to tell the family stories. Wilder appears, however, to be active in her garden, in the community, continuing to make friends. She settled into herself, finally feeling she achieved what she had set out to do—only to watch her husband die.

Almanzo’s death is a perfect example of how Fraser uses the primary source material to show Wilder’s life. Using family friend Neta Seal’s diary, Fraser compassionately describes the scene: “On the following morning, a Sunday, she received a call summoning her to the Wilders’. Almanzo had died. When she arrived, he was in his usual chair, his wife embracing him. ‘She just didn’t want to let him go,’ Neta said.” (469). Fraser could have probably quoted the whole episode from Seal’s diary, but instead uses punctuation, short phrasing and that one statement that says everything we needed to know about how Wilder felt about her husband.

And, yet, Fraser also continues to examine the dichotomy between the mythology around Wilder and her series, foreshadowing the debates that still continue today around the expansion of the mid-west, the treatment of indigenous peoples, and Rose Wilder Lane’s libertarian economic and political views. Like much of this compelling biography, the chapter is uncomfortable, because it doesn’t shy away from truths behind Wilder’s fiction, her relationship with her daughter, and our own perceptions of what we thought we knew about them.

Fraser is not sentimental, nor does she make excuses for Wilder’s beliefs. Rather, she uses all of the primary source material to examine their origin in family, in history and in community, exploring the psychological reasons why Wilder might be fine with helping farmers with a small loan, but against Roosevelt’s New Deal –the scale. Or, how Wilder saw her mistake in Little House on the Prairie and rectified it, but still comfortable being part of the mythology developing around the American west during the Second World War; connecting the release of These Happy Golden Years to the popularity of shows like Oklahoma, that ignored “the dark heart of Andrew Jackson’s genocidal Indian Removal policy” (444). 

Fraser highlights how Wilder is a product of her time, reflecting back both the beauty and the sorrow of the late 19^th, early 20^th century. Something that—given the often use phrase in her fan letters— Wilder was deeply aware about her own life and work.

Nancy: One of the reasons I chose this chapter is that I’ve always found the relationship between Laura and Rose so intriguing. I grew up regarding everyone in Laura’s world as somewhat simpler and more virtuous than in my own. When I was a young adult and read Ghost in the Little House, it was a revelation to imagine a complex, conflicted mother-daughter bond, to see both Laura and Rose as more fully human. At the time I missed Holtz’s very critical portrayal of Wilder, I suppose because I was still identifying as a daughter rather than as a mother—and because it was such a relief to realize that she wasn’t perfect after all.

I loved how reading Prairie Fires—on the heels of reading Pioneer Girl—continues to deepen my understanding of the mother-daughter relationship.  Recently, another Prairie Firesreader on a children’s literature e-mail listserv posed the question of whether Rose was “on the spectrum”—referring, I think, to the possibility that Rose wasn’t so much mentally ill as potentially not neurotypical. I couldn’t get this out of my head when I was reading this chapter of Prairie Fires. Certainly she appears to have had some difficulty with conventional social skills. And whatever the case, I’ve always resisted judging Rose too harshly though it does seem that dealing with her could be very trying. What do you think about this?

Emily: I agree—Rose is a challenging woman. But that’s why I’m drawn to her. Even today, women leaders are evaluated in terms of their “likability,” but Rose was successful, influential, and difficult to like. I love that!

At the same time, it’s clear that Rose had a difficult emotional life. I don’t know how (or if) psychologists might diagnose her today, but Rose herself was concerned about her mental health. She used the then-current medical term “manic depression” (today known as “bipolar disorder”) to describe her moods. She spent her adult life alternating between periods of exuberant planning and spending and periods of despair. 

This optimism/despair pattern is part of Rose’s personal emotional make-up, but it also sounds a lot like the U.S. economy of the 1920s and 1930s. The Roaring Twenties, a spending blitz, slumped into the Depression. The stock market crash of 1929 was a dramatic example of the boom-and-bust cycles that characterize capitalist economic systems. Gold rushes become ghost towns. Logging booms become felled forests. We live in a world where people are always looking for the next big thing—because the current big thing is bound to crash. I don’t know whether Rose had a mental illness, but I suspect Rose’s moods had something to do with her restless belief in the American dream, which inspired her to quest after the next big thing, yet never allowed her to experience a feeling of security.

Nancy: I love the way you put Rose’s behavior in a historical context, which seems to me to be a much wiser route than trying to diagnose her in retrospect, always a precarious undertaking. What interested you about this chapter?

Emily:I liked Fraser’s depiction of the melancholy, nostalgic nature of Wilder’s work—the idea that Wilder was trying to put back together a past that had been fractured. Do you experience Wilder’s work as melancholy? Do you think nostalgia appeals to child readers?

Nancy:The nostalgic vision in Wilder’s work appealed tremendously to my own mother and aunts, who grew up relatively poor down the road from Rocky Ridge during the 1930s and, I think, felt that the Little House books offered a kind of mythology for their own somewhat austere childhoods. Their father had arrived in that region as a boy in a covered wagon, and they lived in a small wood frame house insulated by old newspapers. Their father had his own struggles with supporting the family. Wilder’s books offered a lens that softened their memory of hardship. The books’ nostalgia for simplicity, for an unencumbered life centered on family, nature, music, was certainly part of what led me as a child to see Wilder’s world as far less dimensional than the way I see it today. My mother and aunts regarded any questioning of that mythology to be sacrilegious, and to this day it feels to me pleasantly transgressive to look at Wilder’s work from other points of view—that’s one of the joys of Wilder scholarship for me, and something that attracted me to Prairie Fires.

But while I appreciate new perspectives that feel more aligned with my own worldview than that presented to me by my mother and her sisters, I’m still drawn to that nostalgia. The first time I reread the Little House books as an adult, I was especially struck by the repetitions of words like “happy,” “cozy,” “pretty,” “snug,” and “sweet,” and felt a great sense of gratitude for small pleasures. To me what makes Wilder’s work great, though, is her ability to manage nostalgia without sentimentality—and also because of that melancholy that strikes me as a very real strain that runs underneath, both fueling and destabilizing the nostalgia. I may have seen these books as simple at one time, but now, thinking about Fraser’s discussion of nostalgia and melancholy, I see that the complexity was there all along. One of Fraser’s examples is Laura’s wedding, “among the most melancholy and subdued . . . in children’s literature,” informed by the “storms of ill fortune” to come. This is all subtextual, of course, because, as Fraser says, “Children had to be protected from the truth.” The truth is, to me, such a relief. I remember feeling, vaguely, that books like these were sort of gaslighting me, making me doubt my own vision of reality. The world I lived in felt so much more flawed.

Emily:I love your point about the emotional complexity in Wilder’s relatively spare wedding chapter. As a child reader, I felt that Laura’s wedding marked the “end” of the Laura books (I never really connected with The First Four Years). So Laura’s black wedding dress was, to me, funereal: Laura’s wedding was the end of Laura. There was no more Laura after that. At the same time, concluding the books with a wedding gave me fascinating, frightening sense that life has rigid, yet meaningful, boundaries. You close one door, and it stays shut. You step into a new destiny, and there’s no going back.

I think, as a kid reader, I expected my life would be like Laura’s. I would advance in a sequential way from life stage to life stage, the way the pioneers settled the frontier—in stages. I would experience a sense of progress. But that isn’t how I have experienced my adult life. I wonder if “adulting” feels disappointing because adulthood is mostly wandering in the wilderness, not knowing where you’re going, or if things are going to be okay, or if progress exists at all. Adulting feels much more like the disorderly narrative in Pioneer Girl—Ma and Pa trying to run a hotel, and that not working out, and then trying to farm, and that not working out—than it does in the novels Rose and Laura worked on together.

Where do you see the connection of Wilder and Lane’s writing, with your life?

Nancy:As a writer of memoir and the parent of a child of color, I’ve often grappled with debates about who “owns” life experience, who has the “right” to write about what. I believe on the one hand that we have to be careful of appropriation that furthers stereotypes, while on the other hand our literature is enriched by multiple perspectives on the same experience. So I’m uncomfortable at discussions that imply that Rose “stole” her mother’s material, particularly in writing Let the Hurricane Roarand then Free Land. It seems to me natural that a writer would draw from the stories that she’d been told about her ancestors and the stories from her parents’ lives that had impacted her own; it’s the way that writers make sense of their own heritage.

There are probably many factors influencing Laura’s feeling of betrayal by Let the Hurricane Roar, and I was interested in Fraser’s discussion of how she expressed greater enthusiasm for Free Land. Laura herself was telling others’ stories—her own parents’, Almanzo’s. Was that different because her parents were dead by then, or because, while Fraser mentions that Caroline wrote poetry (a surprise to me), she was an unpublished writer? This made me think a lot about those lines between appropriation and appreciation.

Emily:One of my favorite parts of the novels is when Pa (or someone) cracks a joke and it’s so funny that “even Ma smiles.” I picture Ma as this incredibly stoic person. So I love the idea that she was a poet! At the same time, I’m not surprised—she had that pearl-handled pen, after all.

What Rose did, in my opinion, was savvy marketing. I think she was way ahead of her time, and would have thrived in a 21^stcentury literary marketplace. Today, we see in our movies, TV and books a tendency toward spin-offs, sequels, prequels, etc. Interlinked books contribute to a brand identity that can boost sales. Authors today are expected to “grow a platform” (build an audience) and grow their “personal brand.” In doing so, the line between “writing literature” and “marketing literature” gets blurry. Today we often call writing “content creation,” which encapsulates both the commercial and the literary aspects of a highly commercialized art form.

To keep pace with the ceaseless demand for “content,” writers often recycle, riff off, or remix existing work–and that’s exactly what Rose did.

I don’t think such a ruthlessly commercial world is the ideal world for writers, or for literature– but Rose and Laura were nothing if not survivors. The tactics they used to build their brand have helped perpetuate their legacy and enabled me to enter the world of Little House, and for that, I’m thankful!

Nancy:On a lighter note, do details like the fact that Wilder gave her character much better test scores than she herself made change your notions of the series, if at all?

Emily:I loved learning about Laura’s low grade (69) in history! So funny that a writer whose books have come to be regarded as history was a D+ history student herself. History and government are crucial facets of the novels, and were clearly important dimensions of Laura and Rose’s lives. I loved the part in Prairie Fires when Rose and Laura send around a chain letter encouraging friends to write their Congressmen in support of “America First” foreign policy. The chain letter reminded me of political memes people might share on Facebook today. What do you think Rose’s Facebook presence would be like today? Laura’s?

Nancy: I can envision Rose’s tweets: things like “AN ARMY OF PRINCIPLES WILL PENETRATE WHERE AN ARMY OF SOLDIERS CANNOT!!!”  I picture a younger Laura posting status updates on Facebook like, “Mary lost her sight today, but she is so brave and has never once repined,” or a photograph of her Christmas gifts—a candy cane, a little cake, and a shiny penny with the caption, “There has never been such a Christmas!” I can see social media exaggerating that sense of inadequacy I had as a child because my life didn’t seem to measure up to that of those grateful, uncomplaining pioneers.

Really, though, I think the adult Laura would probably post wise, lyrical observations. And photographs of her chickens.

Well, I’ll get to talk about the Dust Bowl, but it looks like I’m going to have to talk politics, too. Let’s take a deep breath and get to it!

We do begin with a more thorough recap of the Dust Bowl and its effects in the Great Plains, especially. Fraser references The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, and I cannot recommend that book strongly enough for a deep understanding of the cultural and societal factors, not to mention the meteorological ones, around the Dust Bowl. From a weather and climate perspective, the Dust Bowl years were something of an accident, a happenstance. The years were a warm and dry blip in the climatology that in some locations remains unmatched to this day, even as the climate warms.

The state of the land, however, was no accident. For years, driven by economic pressures, farmers had plowed and planted the land virtually unchecked and beyond what was sustainable, priming the entire Great Plains for severe environmental damage. The meteorological accident of persistent warm and dry weather was more than enough to tip the fragile environment into catastrophe. Without protective vegetation, the loose and dried-out topsoil literally lofted away on a series of windstorms. In her letters to Rose, Laura even mentioned dust settling on her farm that came from the Great Plains dusters. The dust choked the life out of the Great Plains – literally, as humans and livestock succumbed to dust-related illnesses and plants of any kind struggled to grow.

Federal researchers arrived to stabilize the soil and save the region. They brought soil conservation techniques that are still used to this day, though the techniques are becoming neglected as generational memory of the Dust Bowl years is lost. Farmers were encouraged to plant shelterbelts, the strips of sometimes shrubby and stubby trees that you still see today every couple of miles across the prairies. It’s hard to even envision the treelessness of the Plains before those shelterbelts were planted – that’s how successful the program was. Farmers also were encouraged to do the unthinkable: let land lie fallow and not grow anything, rotating crops among other fields, to let the soil rest and let cover plants hold down the soil. Or worse, they were asked to destroy crops and livestock that were in oversupply, in order to stabilize the market.

Despite the clear indications that past practices were not working and the clear demonstrations that the soil conservation and economic stabilization measures led by the federal government did work, farmers in the region did not always take kindly to the laws or pressures of how to manage their lands. Even if the numbers worked out to be the right thing, it just felt wrong. The New Deal was not the kind of deal they wanted, and it sowed the seeds of a permanent break from the Democratic Party and the “reddening” of the Great Plains states.

Among those with anti-government views amplified by the New Deal were Rose and Laura. In letters between them, they grumbled about policies and politicians, much like a mother and daughter with shared views might do today on Facebook. While both were firm in their convictions that any government intervention was bad (conveniently looking aside from the policies that had benefitted them throughout their lives), Rose was by far the more vocal and more extreme of the two. Her viewpoints carried her across her blurred lines between fiction and reality, and her rhetoric was borderline dangerous as she wrote about how pleased she would be to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She dove into support of fascism, including the Mussolini regime explicitly, and she published her support in an article, “Credo,” in the Saturday Evening Post. (By the way, having looked at the nostalgic artwork of the Saturday Evening Postthrough my life, I was a little shocked and a lot saddened to learn of its very racist publications in the 1920s.)

The viewpoints manifest in the Little House books, in their strong themes of independence and self-reliance. Laura wrote On the Banks of Plum Creek at the height of the Dust Bowl years, including the peak hot and dry year of 1936, and the effects of the grasshopper plague of her youth echoed into the present heat and dust. Fraser notes that Laura and Rose neglect to include a broader historical context of issues during the locust plagues of the 1870s. Laura’s Pa, like thousands of others, had accepted government aid to prevent starvation, just as he accepted aid later in life, while in Dakota Territory. During the Dust Bowl, Laura’s sister Grace participated in conservation and accepted relief, while Carrie asked Rose and Laura for clothes.

With Laura’s growing success and the publication of On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura accepted one of her only large public speaking engagements as an author, making a well-documented speech at the Detroit Public Library in late 1937. Though the line between fact and fiction has been blurring through the writing of her first few books, it is here that she asserts publicly that every story in the book was true (spoiler: it wasn’t). She added just one caveat: that the stories were not the whole truth, that she had left out some stories that were not responsible to tell children. Additionally, she privately acknowledged to friends that she fictionalized the stories, even while maintaining the public line to children that they were true and real. While it doesn’t buy her a pass for asserting her fictionalized elements were fact, it does give insight that she realized she was fictionalizing the story and lied about it intentionally to preserve the mystique of her family – to make her life more like the Little House than her actual experiences. It’s a gentle reminder to us readers that Laura was a complex human, and humans are prone to make mistakes, especially when they feel their self-preservation is threatened.

Underlying the Dust Bowl, Rose’s radicalized politics, and writing another book in the Little House series, a more personal canyon developed: Rose moved away from Rocky Ridge, never to return. In fact, after leaving in 1937, she never saw Almanzo again, despite his urging to visit. The Wilders returned to their true home, the farmhouse, leaving Rose’s gifted Rock House behind.

This chapter begins with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s journey to visit her past in the prairies. Returning with her husband to DeSmet, South Dakota was a homecoming to a place transformed by time. The landscape contained recognizable faces, but altered landmarks. Reuniting with her younger sisters Carrie and Grace, Laura met the same dissonant familiarity; they, too, had changed. With her parents and her sister Mary deceased, Laura appraised the physical remnants of their family home with Grace, who was seventeen when Laura and Almanzo left South Dakota, and by this time was fifty-four. How startling to miss the entire adulthood of one’s sister in those thirty-seven intervening years! After sorting her family’s belongings, Laura remarked, “Everything of value left there has disappeared” (329), and I wonder if she meant more than monetary worth as Fraser suggests by the hard use of the tenants; the tangible presence of her family had also vanished. I imagine the visit felt alienating and bittersweet.

On this trip, the Wilders were tourists. In addition to visiting family, they went sightseeing at Mt. Rushmore and regional historic sites, including at least one connected with family history. As Fraser relates, Laura used the opportunity to envisage the place and the experiences lived there through the eyes of her relative, but with her own senses. It was an imaginative and empathetic experience conducive to writing historical fiction. The couple also saw the Great Depression evident in the landscape. How did the changed places of their past figure into the narrative of American history? What was the value of her family’s experiences? How could Wilder transform the loss she witnessed into something meaningful? The answer, of course, we know in hindsight.

When Wilder returned home to Missouri, she embarked on the writing and publication of the first book in what became known as the “Little House” series, a fictional version of her life before she left DeSmet. While Wilder’s writings about her childhood began before her trip, the nostalgia of her visit must have been a palpable driving force for her recollections and efforts to recreate the past in a new form.

I have to confess, until recently, my knowledge of Little House was primarily through the television show (I know most of the episodes by heart). I was bored with Little House in the Big Woods when I first read it as a child (though I am enjoying Wilder’s books as an adult). My interest in Wilder’s life was present then, but Prairie Fires is my first in-depth foray into Wilder’s biography. My historical and literary passions led me in the direction of a different 19^th century author, who – to my great surprise – made several appearances in this chapter! When Fraser alluded to the literary significance in the similarity between the titles Little House… and Little Women, my attention was caught. I have spent the past twenty-five years studying Louisa May Alcott, her family, and literary circle in Concord Massachusetts. Frasers’ observation that the title emphasized “the security – and insecurity – of home” (334) lit up my mind with thoughts about how place, home, and family function within LH culture, and further parallels between Wilder with Alcott. Both female authors were primary earners, anxious about poverty and relieving the monetary and physical burdens of their family. Both appealed to home, family, and autobiography in their most popular writings in a way that overshadows their unsettled domestic lives, frequent moves, and economic hardships caused in some measure by their fathers’ idealism and the male head of household’s indebtedness and inability to earn. While family is a constant in Wilder’s fiction, the appeal of home rooted in place is a characteristic that Fraser draws out. It speaks also to pilgrimages to the places the Ingalls and Wilder families lived and the settings of her fiction (the two often blurred) – another similarity shared with Alcott – that developed in the decades after Wilder’s death.

It is remarkable that even before publication there was a confusion between autobiography and fiction at the heart of Wilder’s storytelling, which required clarification to her publishers – and perhaps in the author and her editor-daughter’s consciousness. It seems Rose, in particular, struggled distinguishing between fact and fiction. Laura also experienced dissonance when her daughter used Wilder’s parents as characters in her own work, Let the Hurricane Roar – which Rose compared in importance to Little Women, ironically seeing her own adult novel as greater literary value than her mother’s work for children – featuring events of Wilder’s marriage. Wilder viewed this as fiction different from her own, jarringly with her associations and not “connected with her family,” though admittedly based on “facts” related to Rose as personal history (347). What does this fictionalizing mean for loose autobiography and authenticity in the no-less-fictional LH series? It raises questions as to whom the Ingalls and Wilder family heritage belonged. If to Laura, why not also to her daughter Rose?

Fictionalizing family history bred mutual feelings of distrust, resentment, and ingratitude between mother and daughter. It also joined their collaborative strengths in creating a lasting legacy bequeathed to American national culture. In midst of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, as farms failed, the LH series celebrated agriculture, self-reliant endurance, and pioneer families as foundations of national character and landscape. Wilder nostalgically recreated the wild prairie before cultivation turned it to dust. The Ingalls’ abandoned prairie home echoed the empty houses Wilder saw on the prairies in 1931 when she visited DeSmet. Perhaps one of the most moving passages in Prairie Fires thus far is about Wilder’s writings about the wild prairie roses (364). Although Fraser does not explicitly make the connection, Wilder’s prairie roses are surely an evocation of her daughter, a result of her courtship, and reflecting what her daughter meant to her. Fraser reminds us that the volatile emotions and generational conflict surrounding the composition of the Little House books are part of what make the series as much a product of the time when written, as the books are a reflection the setting.

Kevin:
As I did with chapter 6, here are definitions for words that I had to look up due to the imparity between Fraser’s vocabulary and my own. Once again, don’t judge.

• Rapine: the seizure of someone’s property by force
• Temerity: excessive confidence or boldness
• Importune: to harass someone constantly about something
• Hagiographical: biographical, but putting the subject in a flattering light

Karen:
There is no shame in having a smaller vocabulary than a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Kevin:
After reading about the extravagant costs of the unneeded Rock House, here I go once again wondering about Rose’s psychological state and wondering what experiences caused her to be so irresponsible and frivolous with money. As Fraser emphasizes constantly, the Wilders were “parsimonious” throughout their lives, so Rose obviously didn’t get it from her parents. Perhaps it was her way of rebelling against their habits, or atoning for the possible sin of accidentally setting the house on fire. As I read on, I start wondering if she was mentally ill.

Karen:
Wondering? I feel as though Rose always needed to feel that she was the one in control. This is evident when she alienated her friends for (gasp) getting married without her permission. I imagine Laura and Almanzo felt torn over the Rock House situation (both the construction and the cost). I’m sure they realized how crazy Rose was acting, but she was still their daughter. They loved her very much and only wanted her to be happy. So, they put on a happy face (or not) and accepted the Rock House (and patiently waited for her to move away, so they could move back into their beloved farm house).

Kevin:
Reading of Mary’s death and reflections on how she changed Laura’s life, it seems possible that if Mary never become blind, Laura might never have worked her academic abilities as far as she did. Laura’s discovery of her gifts as a writer were, as the old cliche goes, the silver lining to the cloud. As I read the description of the start of Pioneer Girl, I notice that certain cadence that so many of her sentences have. I think, had Laura been overly schooled, say, had she attended a university, would her writing have changed to the point where she would no longer have been an effective children’s author? However, she was not, so her simple descriptions that the child Laura originally developed for her teenage sister remained with her into adulthood.

Karen:
I also don’t think Laura and Mary would have been as close in their teenage years had Mary not lost her sight. The sibling rivalry described in the earlier books disappears once Laura becomes Mary’s “eyes.” We see Laura diligently working hard to help earn the money to send Mary to college. The sense of accomplishment Laura must have felt once the family could finally send Mary to college might also have had a huge impact on her “ambition.” How many of us would have the confidence to sit down and write our biography in our retirement years with the intention of having it published?

Kevin:
Despite my previous contempt for Rose, Fraser’s description of the correspondence that led to the creation of Big Woods reminds me how essential she was to the creation of the Little House series. All of these suggestions made that book what it was, and who knows if that book would have existed or become what it was without them?

Karen:
I seriously doubt Laura would have known where to begin to seek publication had it not been for Rose. I don’t think she would have pursued writing at all. We do have to be grateful to Rose for that.

The majority of the rest of the chapter was spent telling us about Rose’s adventures, her relationship and life choices.  I will admit, Rose is not my favorite person, but she led a very obscure life, which is most cases meant she was absent from her parents a great deal of the time.  One of the most intriguing things that this chapter brought to light for me is the fact that Laura always saw Rose still as a child and how Rose treated her parents, but primarily her mother, as a child. 

Rose traveled extensively meeting people from all over, having adventures and collecting stories.  She loved her time in Albania and went back there many times.  She kept diaries that turned into published material, that she earned money for.  During this time she also suffered from severe depression.  She ended a long standing relationship with her partner Guy Moyston, an Associated Press reporter whom her parents were quite fond of and approved. 

The most interesting part of this chapter to me was Rose’s obsession with the stock market and her gifting her parents $500 per year, even when she could clearly not afford to do so sometimes.  She drank the koolaid per se and convinced her parents that the stock market was a sure bet, which it was not.  In my mind she used the money to show her parents how successful she was, even though for the most part they could take care of themselves.  Manly and Bess still continued to frugal manner.

Rose very much blows in the wind, going where she wants, when she wants.  She is a free spirit and given her mother’s free spirit, it has always intrigued me as to the why they did not get along better and were not close.  Is it a case of being too alike?  Resentment and fear of failure?  I’m thankful my mother and I are not like Rose and Laura.  Sometimes I do wish I had Rose’s sense of adventure, which is one of the things I admire most about her.