Series 1 - Mary Jane Hill Anderson memoir

3 sub-series

The memoir transcription was made from a copy of the autobiography received from the Minnesota Historical Society. Additional family details were supplied by Alan D. Beggs in November 1990.

[This memoir contains outdated attitudes or language that does not reflect the current views or positions of the University of Galway Library. Reader discretion is advised.] Materials related to the Mary Jane Hill Anderson memoir. Mary Jane Hill Anderson was born in 1827 in Bailieborough, County Cavan into a Church of Ireland family and emigrated from Liverpool, arriving in New Orleans, in 1850. Anderson married in Ireland in 1850 and emigrated that same year, eventually travelling up the Mississippi and settling in Minnesota. She wrote her memoir, Autobiography of Mary Jane Hill Anderson, Wife of Robert Anderson at the age of 95 in 1922. A number of Anderson relatives followed from Ireland to Minnesota and all lived nearby at Anderson Lake in the early 1850s. The memoir also details the first school house in the area built on a nearby farm, encounters with local Indigenous populations, log cabin building, land acquisition, homesteading in Minnesota, the Battle of Shakopee and the Dakota War of 1862, religion in the area, the American Civil War, amongst other aspects of Anderson's own life. The series includes: typed transcripts and photocopies of the memoir; Kerby A. Miller's research correspondence and notes; extensive research on the Anderson family and Eden Prairie, Minnesota; copies of secondary source materials; newspaper clippings; and census research.