Progress report - I am really enjoying writing a biography of Elizabeth Mansfield irving, my great grandmother. I now am calling it One Woman's Voice: Biography of Elizabeth Mansfield Irving, Elocutionist & Women's Rights Pioneer and I expect to publish it possibly in February.
My search has been helped a lot by being able to get a whole lot more information. It seems that as these people move into the new century they appear in newspapers a lot more, and many of these have been recovered. There are other results of their making it up into the Roaring Twenties and beyond: they have cars; they discover California; they eventually even get telephones.
I don't mean to be facetious. It's fascinating to study an era when things changed so fast, like ours. They argue about how such changes will affect their social structure. The old newspapers are full of opinions on various subjects, as journalists all seemed to be pretty good writers, and there were lots of them around.
Elizabeth was a performer. Through various accounts I can see her in front of people, people who are sometimes yelling or screaming or demanding an encore. We see her crank out the good poems of the age and stir people up into patriotic feeling. It's really an amazing account.
