I actually started my Kansas Quilter book series back in 2002, but finally shelved it in 2005 when agri-tourism took over our Bison Farm.  I didn’t have the dedicated blocks of time to work on it anymore.

Now that we’ve retired from our farm business, I’m going back over research notes and already written chapters to pick up the series again.

And I’m also looking for information that wasn’t available before online. Like census records. Instead of going to a physical place to actually see the written pages, I can put in the name, state, choose the year of the census I want —and voila— the actual page pops up on the screen in its original handwritten form. It so cool to see who was in the family at the time, and it even lists anyone that is working for them too.

Pieratt family- 1900 Kansas census

Of course some information is easy to find, and other questions I have will never be answered. I guess that’s where the fiction part of my writing fills in the gaps.

I’m also working on the list of family members that will be my main characters, their conflicts, plot, etc. Kizzie will be the “heroine” of sorts, telling the early history of her part of the Kansas prairie along with her family’s dreams. And quilts and quilting will be primary theme for this Kansas pioneer.

I’m sure every quilt Kizzie made had a story behind it…and I want to share it with you, my readers.

In 1938 my mother’s great aunt Martha Pieratt gave her a quilt. At that time the quilt was over 100 years old and had been handed down through her mother’s Kennedy family.  Doing some research on it while planning my Trail of Thread book series, it turns out to be the Cleveland Tulip pattern and it came with Martha’s mother Maggie Kennedy when she moved from Ohio to Kansas in 1858.

Quilts and quilting seemed like a perfect theme for the stories of my mother’s side of the family, so I wove a quilt theme into this book series and featured twelve quilt patterns in each book.  The titles also went with the quilt theme.

My Trail of Thread book was about Deborah Pieratt’s wagon trail journey to the Kansas Territory in 1854. The second book, Thimble of Soil featured Margaret Ralston Kennedy’s decision to move her family from their safe Ohio home to the unsettling territory in 1855. And the final book in series, Stitch of Courage, followed Maggie Kennedy Pieratt during her young years as she marries James Monroe Pieratt during the Civil War.