Judith Keeling Book

Since her groundbreaking memoir In My Father's House, which recounts an agonizing break from fundamentalist polygamy, Dorothy Allred Solomon has continued to publish on the lives of Mormon women and the dissonance many experience in connection to fundamentalist pasts. The more Solomon delved into issues of agency, the more she felt her own dissonance and began to look for answers in her ancestral past-those early women she knew only through family stories. Finding Karen: An Ancestral Mystery springs from a decade of research into Solomon's paternal great-great grandmother Karen Sorensen Rasmussen, who converted to Mormonism in Denmark and immigrated to the United States in 1859. Held up to Solomon throughout childhood as an icon of feminine heroism, a stoic handcart immigrant who helped establish Zion in Utah, Karen became equally emblematic of Solomon's own strong-willed determination and of everything Solomon found lacking in herself. Finding Karen is a revelatory journey, twinned with Solomon's own in surprising ways. As valuable a study in recovering history as it is in the need to re-examine family stories, Solomon's retelling takes readers through the twists and turns of discovery/recovery as she encounters them. In doing so, she illuminates not only the risk inherent in trusting even what persists as historic record but also the insights to be gained from assiduous persistence.

Frieda Harms was born into a farming family in Indian Territory in 1906. Widowed at thirty and left with three children in the midst of the Great Depression, she worked as a farmer, a railroad cook, a mill worker, and a nurse in four states. She died in 1983. Sandra Scofield spent most of her childhood with her grandmother Frieda and remained close to her in adulthood. When Frieda died, Sandra received her Bible and boxes of her photographs, letters, and notes. For thirty years, Sandra dipped into that cache. Sandra always sensed an undercurrent of hard feelings within her grandmother, but it was not until she sifted through Frieda's belongings that she began to understand how much her life had demanded, and how much she had given. At the same time, questions in Sandra's own history began to be answered, especially about the tug-of-war between her mother and grandmother. At last, in Mysteries of Love and Grief, Scofield wrestles with the meaning of her grandmother's saga of labor and loss, trying to balance her need to understand with respect for Frieda's mystery.