In search of Maggie Book Riley, my grandmother

I never met her, but I still remember the one photo I saw of her: a young woman, circa 1910, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, serious expression, eyes very much like John's--my father and her son. She was my grandmother, and she disappeared from family life so long before my birth that she may as well have been a remote ancestor. Her name was Margaret (Maggie) Riley, nee Book. Born in 1878, she was no more than 34 when she left her husband and kids, never to be heard from again. I no longer have the photo, but the hat I remember was something like one of these.

Maggie left her home in Kansas City in 1912, when my Dad was only nine. She had three other children, ages 7--13. As my father told the story during my childhood, she came to each of the children, asking them if they wished to leave with her and a male companion or stay with their father. They all elected to stay with their father.

She was only 16 when she married, shockingly young by the standards of my generation and by the same standards, still young when she left. My Dad never blamed her. "She could have drowned me, but she didn't," he used to say before launching into quasi-Dickensonian stories of his life with the uncle and aunt who subsequently took care of them while his father, a carpenter with the railroad, was at work.

I continued to wonder about Maggie from time to time and still do. The basic facts are still unknown: Where did she go? How did she make her life? How and when did she die? Then there are the deeper questions: Why didn't she try to communicate--or did she try and the kids weren't told? Was she happy? Did she make another family or create a different kind of life? What kind of independent life was even possible for her in early 20th century America?

Recently my interest in Maggie's life was rekindled when I got an email from Carol S., with the subject line, "We're cousins!" She had taken a DNA test via Ancestry. com, as did my sister Joan and I, and  our names came up as genetic matches. Carol's great-grandfather, Theodore Book, was Maggie's father. Carol traces her family line back to the family Theodore created with his second wife after Maggie's mom died.

With an intermittent interest in genealogy, my sister Joan and I had already found records from Maggie's early life in rural Missouri, near Odessa. Theodore married Ella Boucher, who died in 1890, at the age of 28 after giving birth to 6 children, including Maggie. Six months after Ella's death, Theodore remarried. Four years later, still just a teenager, Maggie married Hugh Riley. My sister Joan and I speculate that she may have had difficulties with her stepmother or home life in general. Theodore and his new wife, Almedia, went on to have 15 children--for a total of 21 for Theodore. Perhaps there was just no space or peace for Maggie or perhaps she became an unpaid nursemaid to her younger siblings. Or perhaps her father was the problem.  My new cousin Carol's research turned up that Theodore was a "mean" one--so mean that Almedia refused to be buried anywhere near him. (Her children honored the request and put her at the other end of the cemetery.) In any case, Maggie left for a new life.

It could be that the ever-growing database of genealogy tools will help shed light on Maggie's fate. Yet with the huge time gap--more than a century since her disappearance--and the lack of oral or written records, I'm not optimistic. We may well have to settle for remembering her with kindness and compassion, and reminding ourselves that every single advance in women's rights over the past century has been well worth fighting for. Rest in peace, Maggie.

A mystery almost solved: what happened to the Anasazi

In 1976 I moved from Chicago to Colorado in 1976, and I still remember the feeling of wonder, that a landscape so different from the flat Midwest was in the same country. I started learning to backpack almost immediately, hiking at altitude among trees and rivers, breathing the dry, crisp air, wondering at the temperature extremes between night and day. Within a couple of years, I had branched out to a different landscape: the red rock formations of western Colorado and Utah, archeology-rich Northern New Mexico, and the cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region, home to Mesa Verde National Park. Here I am in two pictures from the late 70s on a trip to Utah. The first includes my dog, Sophie. The second shows something of the human/landscape scale that fascinated me.



On a later trip to Mesa Verde, I was fascinated by the structures that were home to the Pueblo people for 700 years. There were about 25,000 of them in the area in the mid-1200s, and then suddenly they were gone. Called the Anasazi (Navajo term for "ancient foreigners"), they disappeared; by the 1280s, no one remained. The prevailing speculation was that a drought period had forced people to move. But where? How to know centuries later? I confess I rather liked the mystery. It was part of what still seemed exotic to me--a world so different from what I had known.

Today, I find that I like the solution even better than the mystery. Recently going through back issues of one of my favorite magazines, High Country News, I found an article by Krista Langlois, which explained how much of that mystery has finally been solved.  (Click here to read the full story.) The reasons were rooted not only in science, but in the stories of indigenous people today, specifically  origin stories of Native Americans speaking the Tewa language in Northern New Mexico.

The science was not surprising, given the data-crunching powers of modern computing. In 2001 a multi-disciplinary team of scientists formed the Village Ecodynamics Project. For the next 13 years, they analyzed population history at thousands of sites in the Southwest. The next step was  analyzing soil data and estimating natural resources and agricultural yields. Next came a computer simulation of human and environmental history, a kind of "Sim City for the ancient Southwest," Langlois calls it. They ran it 500 times, tweaking the data each time, and finally patterns emerged.  The patterns cast doubt on the dominant drought theory, as the Anasazi were already gone by the time the drought hit full force. Still, mystery remained.

Another line of inquiry turned to the social fabric of this ancient world. One project researcher, archeologist Scott Ortman, developed a theory that inequality was at work. Between 900 and 1200 the population tripled. Yet each family was still farming its own plot of land, living around a family-sized kiva. Over time those plots of land got smaller, creating a community of haves and have nots. There is evidence of violence and sudden departures. Perhaps this is not surprising either. As I read, I thought of many places in rural Europe in the 19th century, when mass emigration ensued for the same reason.

What did surprise me, however, was learning that Ortman's work is also rooted in listening to the oral histories of Tewa people, stories that told them that they were descended from the Anasazi. Instead of dismissing them as myth, Ortman started looking for clues connecting them to their ancestors at Mesa Verde. He found them. DNA analysis was involved, but more interesting to me was the linguistic connection: a word for a kind of roof found in ceremonial kivas, a work for pottery derived from older words for woven objects typical of Mesa Verde pottery; and other words and stories.

As Langlois explains, Ortman speculates that as Mesa Verde's people realized their world was unraveling, bringing changes in the food supply, overcrowding, and violence, they decided to migrate to the Northern Rio Grande, a place they knew about from traders. Oral stories say it took them "12 steps" to travel from their ancestral home to their new one; this could refer to the 12 days it may have taken them to walk the 250 miles between the two sites.

Ortman's research suggests that while the Anasazi moved to various places across the Southwest, the six Tewa-speaking tribes are the "most direct cultural descendants." Here's a map of their probable journeys:


Still, the mystery hasn't been completely solved and may never be with so many centuries separating us from that culture, but the complexity of the solution is much greater than the simple explanation I once accepted. And it's satisfying. Knowing some of the pathways these communities took builds a bridge to our time: the very common story of migration, of seeing a new place for the first time and making a life there. It's also a bridge in the sense that equality and inequality played a role for the ancients as well as for moderns. Droughts are cyclical, Langlois points out, yet the descendants of the Anasazi in the Tewa Basin did not flee. She writes, "The societies and traditions that developed were so strong they persisted through waves of colonization and through industrial development and the large-scale mining of the earth....Puebloans in the Northern Rio Grande structured their communities around a central plaza where work was shared, ...rituals held, and the harvest was inequitably distributed."

Happy to let go of the simplistic explanation I once casually accepted decades ago , I look forward to another visit to the Four Corners region some day, this time with a deeper perspective.