Jamie Janosz

    Lately, I've been living vicariously through one of my college students as she made a springtime trip to Paris. Ahhhhh....to be in Paris, again.   I love that city - I've been obsessed with it since high school French class. My friend, Cathy, and I were so Paris-crazed, that we talked her parents into inviting a foreign-exchange student to live with them. He was French, indeed, but did not live up to our teenage fantasies of the cute Parisian boy. He was averse to showers and a bit of a grouchy loner.   Just after I was married, I finally took a trip to Paris with my husband. We rode the Metro, visited the Notre Dame, and ate croissants in a cafe. Paris was everything I'd imagined and more. It was a bit gritty - a tad decadent - and so, so, so gloriously cool.   We loved the Rodin museum with its enormous front lawn and statue garden. We listened to jazz on a boat docked at the Seine. We ate anchovies on pizza in a dark alley-side cafe. W...

This week, I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, to visit the Wisconsin Historical Archives collection on the McCormick family. Nettie McCormick, wife of the inventor of the reaper - Cyrus McCormick, is one of the eight women in my book. The building is being restored, but the interior is gorgeous. Filigreed windows, marble floors and a winding staircase. Fueled by Starbucks, I started up the grand steps. The Wisconsin Historical Society Archives were granted the McCormick collection in the 1950s. There is a massive amount of information, 12 million pages, kept in files about the family and their businesses.  Cyrus McCormick changed the landscape of farming worldwide with his invention of the reaper. The couple changed Chicago and the world by giving millions of dollars to religion and educational institutions. What struck me as I requested box after box, was how odd it would be to have your life documented in this way. There are files of interviews ...

I love a good mystery. I enjoy peering into clues from the past, like my childhood hero, girl detective Nancy Drew, and putting together pieces of a story. My love of research has been useful in my current project. I am writing about the lives of eight women for my book - that now has an offical title: When Others Shuddered: Eight Women Who Didn't Give Up. These women all lived more than a century ago - so I can't talk to them. I can only read about their lives on dusty old pages and microfilm. They grew up in small towns across the country. Some of them were members of wealthy families - one was the child of slaves. Many of them had tragic events, briefly inserted into reports of their life stories, that certainly impacted who they became. Right now, I am researching wealthy philanthropist Nettie McCormick - wife of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper. While Nettie had all the money she would ever need, she faced troubles with her family. Two of her ch...