Pioneer WOmen: PAST & PRESENT 2022

The Pioneer Women: Past and Present event included an exhibit of posters about women’s female ancestors; and art by women in the community with the theme of ancestors or family. The program included living history performances, music and video.

Girls and women in the community were encouraged to research and choose a female ancestor to submit for an exhibition of 22 posters. For the living history, selected women were chosen to represent their female ancestors, dressed in the clothing of her era as part of the program. They had carefully rehearsed a monologue of their ancestor’s story. Each one of these women said this experience changed their life.

Some of the ancestor stories from the living history included:

• French orphan girl who sailed to Canada in the 1600s

• Woman during the American Revolutionary War, whose husband was a hero

• Norwegian mother and new emigrant whose six sons returned after fighting in the US Civil War

• Welch girl whose future sons left for a America against her wishes

• Brave and gutsy Appalachian woman on the frontier of Kentucky

• Japanese-Hawaiian woman who survived disease and a tsunami

• African American woman from the South who moved north with her family and helped establish a church in Illinois

• Hawaiian woman who left Hawaii against great odds, navigating a long journey with her children to join her husband in Chicago.

Some of these women’s stories were found on Family Search (online genealogy site) Others had access to primary sources from journals kept in the family. I helped some women dig deep with research to find details that were not easy to discover.

As soon as I was invited to serve as a female leader in my church (Stake Relief Society counselor) my desire was to organize a large scale women’s event that would honor female pioneer ancestors who are often overlooked in history. Iowa City and the southeast Iowa area, is a special place in history as the place where thousands of Latter-day Saint pioneers camped to build handcarts before they trekked West to Utah in the mid nineteenth century. I discovered some of my ancestors were amongst these women, even though I grew up in Australia. Of particular interest to me was enslaved or free black women who were LDS pioneers in Iowa and have have not been recognized. I also wanted to recognize modern pioneers amongst us, to show that being a pioneer isn’t just something that happened in the olden days. I was excited to share the divirsity in our church and the ways women contribute and lead in their communities.

Through research, art, music and drama, I hoped to light the spark for women to connect with their ancestors as the exciting adventure it has been for me.

-Sonja Strathearn