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A 4th generation Californian, I grew up in Alhambra with aching lungs in the summer from the smog. I went to Catholic schools for 12 years in the days of the nuns wearing habits. They had EVERYTHING in their huge pockets including scissors and smelling salts, which Sr. Erminold actually used on me when I fainted at a piano recital! I graduated from UC Irvine and became a math teacher.
While raising my kids, I lived in a beautiful home in San Clemente with a view of the ocean. After getting a horse, I moved to Oregon to have room for him. Horses don't fit well on a cul-de-sac in Orange County.
I am now married to a man with 8 children! We have 10 total and expecting our 20th grandchild. We live in a large home which my husband built in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon where it truly seems to rain for 9 months straight.
I enjoy playing the piano, genealogy, and horses. Since I retired from teaching, I took the time to write a book. The Seamstress of Jamestown is my first but not my last. I have often heard writers and critics say that a first novel is often the best. I can see that in mine. I put more of myself and my mother into it than I ever could again.
My mother was a seamstress in New York City, working at one of the top dressmaking houses on 5th Avenue in 1938. She worked on a dress for Eleanor Roosevelt and embroidered the initials on Kate Smith's lingerie. I used some of the sewing details she described for my heroine.
Although my book is fiction, it is immersed in true history, both in Baltimore and the California gold rush town of Jamestown. It is also sprinkled with my and my mother's personal history including some Sr. Erminold lore.
Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite
In The Seamstress of Jamestown by Barbara Hettwer, Emma has a dream. She's had this dream since she was a young girl and she read her brother's book about the wild west. Emma's dream becomes her life's ambition, to venture west and create a life of her own. Emma grows up with the intention of following through with that plan. She coerces the servants at her family home to teach her the basics: cooking, milking the cow, mucking out stalls, so that she can take care of herself. She learns business and finance from her father, so that she can support herself. When she comes of age, instead of seeking a comfortable life as a wife, she convinces her parents to allow her to venture west to start life on her own. Remember, this is the late 1800s, when women, especially women from well-to-do families, were not allowed to venture out on their own. Tired of the stuffiness of Baltimore society, Emma does manage to convince her parents to let her venture west. She settles in Jamestown, California, and sets up a business as a seamstress, reaching out to other, less-fortunate women to teach them the trade.
However, this story is not about Emma the seamstress. Not really. It is about Emma and her family. She does marry and she does have children. Halfway through the book, the story starts to follow the lives of her children, the lives of her parents as they decide to venture west to join their daughter and the lives of some of the people who are connected to Emma's family. At the mid-point, it's almost reading like a family memoir, a real-life person's story. It is an interesting read and the historical research was well done, well presented.
