Under traditional English and American property law, married women had no rights to own property—real property or personal property. Their husbands controlled their property. But the 19th century was a time of change for women’s property rights, and Oregon was at the forefront of some of these changes. As I’ve […]
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Marital Conflicts Between Precision and Efficiency
Because of the pandemic, over the past many months my husband and I have been at home together most of each day. It’s given me an opportunity to see our differences in a more concentrated light. The other day I came upon him transferring our laundry from washer to dryer. […]
Continue readingMurders in Oregon Territory: History Is Stranger Than Fiction
I’ve written before that my ancestor, Cyrenus Hooker, was the first person murdered in Polk County, Oregon. His murder took place in February 1852. I recently came across an article about another killing that took place in May 1852, when Nimrod O’Kelly fatally shot Jeremiah Mahoney in Benton County, Oregon, […]
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The Lemon Juice Incident
I wrote a previous post about an unfortunate situation involving orange juice. There is an earlier incident in my marriage involving lemon juice. Forty years ago, in the summer of 1978, my husband and I both had clerkships (what law students call internships) in Los Angeles. We had been married […]
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The Oregon Donation Land Claim Act and Marriage
I wrote back in October 2015 about the Oregon land laws in the 1840s, and in that post I mentioned the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act (known as the Donation Land Law), which was passed by Congress on September 27, 1850. My current work-in-progress takes place in late 1850 and […]
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After Forty Years, I Wonder—Did He Ever Propose or Not?
There is one issue that I continue to debate with my husband of almost forty years—did he ever ask me to marry him or not? He swears he did, but I don’t remember it. You’d think a girl would remember something like that if it had happened, wouldn’t you? Even […]
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Another Treasure: “Brought a Girl Home to Mother”
My last post contained some pictures I found as “treasures” from my cleaning projects. This post is about another treasure—a postcard my husband sent his great-aunt after our first trip together to Missouri, my first trip ever to Missouri. I’ve written about this visit before, the first time I met […]
Continue readingFirst Wedding Present: Mixing Bowls
Sometime during the summer between our first and second years of law school, my husband-to-be and I decided to get married. We set the date for Thanksgiving weekend that autumn, back in my home town of Richland, Washington. Then we went about our graduate-student lives—going to classes, working on law […]
Continue readingAn Almost Sixty-Year Love Story, or Sixty-Six, If You Start at the Beginning
Shortly after Christmas last year, my father commented to me that it was the first Christmas in sixty-six years he had not spent with my mother. “Ever since I took her to the Snow Ball when we were sophomores in high school,” he said. They started dating as fifteen-year-olds, “went […]
Continue readingBefore the Good Ones Are Taken
I mentioned last week that I left home for college about the time my sister turned nine. She soon found out that she missed me more than she thought she would. Shortly after I arrived at Middlebury College, my sister wrote me a letter. I don’t have the letter any […]
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