Lost SF landmarks I discovered while writing 'San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries'

My book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” just celebrated its first birthday on August 28. It’s full of so much information and trivia about the city, but I learned many more things that I had to leave out because they didn’t have anything to do with burying the dead. Here are a few of those discoveries.

1. The Bay-side waterfront looked very different before the 1850s

Before San Francisco’s first civil engineers began sculpting the eastern shoreline of San Francisco, downtown, North Beach and South Beach looked very different. This map from the David Rumsey collection shows what the shoreline looked like at the time, along with the imagined blocks that would go in once the Bay was filled. In many spots, the Bay reached most of the way to Montgomery Street, which is now half a mile from the waterfront. This is why there are so many ships buried beneath the streets of downtown SF — about 40, experts estimate. 

2. Downtown was full of sand dunes

An 1853 map of San Francisco, showing large dunes along Market Street, especially near Second and Third streets. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection.

If you know what downtown San Francisco looked like when settlers arrived, it’s mind-boggling that it ever became an urban center. It was wet, swampy, and riddled with massive sand hills. The design of today’s Market Street was hampered by a number of sand dunes, particularly a 60-foot dune where the Palace Hotel is now (at the intersection with New Montgomery), and a second dune nearly 90 feet tall near Market and Third, about 100 feet away. Between 1852 and 1873, the sand was slowly removed and used to fill several spots along the waterfront, bringing the Bay shoreline closer to what it looks like today.

3. There was a lagoon south of Fort Mason where people did their laundry

An 1857 map showing the Washerwoman’s Lagoon. North is to the right, while south is left; the land marked as “San Jose” is Point San Jose, now the location of Forth Mason. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection.

The first time I saw the Washerwoman’s Lagoon on a map of 1850s San Francisco, I was baffled. I didn’t know if this was a cute nickname or a reflection of a real practice in Gold Rush-era SF. Turns out, it’s the latter. Apparently, it started when some Chinese residents established a laundry business at the lake near today’s Gough and Greenwich streets. Before long, others were taking advantage of the free water and “they would make a Sunday outing of it, taking their families and their picnic lunches and, in wheelbarrows and dump carts, their washing. After scrubbing and rinsing it down by the shore, they would hang it on the chaparral to dry, and then that night would take it home and iron it,” according to FoundSF. 

This is, in fact, how Laguna Street got its name. And just a block or so south of the lagoon was the city’s first Jewish Cemetery (between Franklin and Gough, Green and Broadway). 

4. There was an actual peat bog near 7th and Mission

An 1852 U.S. Coastal Survey Map of San Francisco, from downtown to Mission Bay (on right). Mission Plank Road is the long diagonal that clips the edge of the swampy wetlands at today’s 7th and Mission. Courtesy of the David Rumsey map collection, by way of FoundSF.

We might associate peat bogs with Scotland and Ireland, but San Francisco had one of its own, which complicated plans to build a wooden road from downtown to the Mission District in the 1850s. They decided to build a bridge on pilings to get across the bog, but “the first pile, forty feet long, at the first blow of the pile driver sank out of sight, indicating that there was no bottom within forty feet to support a bridge. One pile having disappeared, the contractor hoisted another immediately over the first and in two blows drove the second down beyond the reach of the hammer … there was no foundation within eighty feet,” according to J.S. Hittell’s “History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California.” This and other swampy areas in the city were “forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat moss eight or ten feet thick.” Read the whole, wild account of trying to build the Mission plank road here. 

The San Francisco Magdalen Asylum register, 1857-1872

Notes from the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum register.

[Mrs. Swords was] taken by her husband May 20, 1863. Before leaving, she left a letter for No. 96 (Mary Augusta, 14, of Kentucky), to whom she had taken a great fancy, urging her to leave even if she had to jump from a window, and promising her a home. Her husband afterwards tried openly to force the girl out but failed.

These lines were written into the resident register of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum sometime in 1863. Mrs. Swords (no first name given) entered the Catholic-run institution with her 12-year-old daughter, M., on May 9. Within 11 days, Mrs. Swords, 32 and born in Ireland, took a fond and likely maternal interest in Mary Augusta, whose last name may have been Binhammer, but it’s often difficult to decipher the nuns’ cursive. 

The register I’ve been slowly transcribing — a copy of the original kept in the Sisters of Mercy Archive in North Carolina — begins in 1857 and ends in late June of 1872. It documents the names of 663 girls and women (and, likely, trans and nonbinary folks) who stayed in “The Mag” during those years, whether they left after a few days or dedicated themselves to the Sisters of Mercy for life. 

For those who haven’t already heard me talk about this or read my 2022 Mission Local article, a group of Catholic nuns belonging to the Sisters of Mercy came to San Francisco from Ireland in the mid-1850s and started the Magdalen Asylum. It was affiliated with those in Ireland, the UK and Europe, whose mission was to “rescue” so-called “fallen women:” Sex workers, the mentally ill, those addicted to drugs and alcohol, and unmarried women and girls who became pregnant. One note in the register from 1863, regarding 7-year-old Mary Neval, describes her “premature depravity” — a local Right Reverend was likely blaming her for sexual abuse she suffered at home.

Ellen Gray, 18, entered the Mag on Aug. 1, 1858: 

Went to her parents May 1, 1859. Respectably married to a German July 1859. Her infant was adopted by a lady recommended by F.P. Magagnotti. 

Eliza Monaghan, 46, entered on Aug. 29, 1859: 

Her mind was never perfect, by degrees she became quite (this word is unreadable) and was transferred to the Lunatic Asylum July 9, 1864. 

On Oct. 29, 1858, Mary Campbell, 27, and Elizabeth Reilly, 16, ran away from the Mag “disguised in men's clothes.”

Mrs. Hanson, 26, entered on Jan. 5, 1862: 

Went to the county hospital, died in St. Mary's Hospital Sept. 28, 1863. Her eldest boy sent to Orphan Asylum, the second adopted by Mrs. Kelly, Sacramento, and the baby by a lady here.

Later, the asylum also opened a prison wing, taken in teen girls who’d been convicted of minor “crimes” including homelessness, sex work, petty theft, “incorrigibility,” or “leading an idle and dissolute life.” I’ve already transcribed nearly 200 articles from local newspapers of the era, describing many of these teens and their circumstances.

Like the institutions across the pond, which have become more commonly known as Magdalen(e) Laundries, the San Francisco facility processed industrial laundry, along with providing embroidery and other sewing services for businesses and the public. The inmates served as unpaid labor, working long and back-breaking hours while the income went toward supporting very institution that kept them confined. 

San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum operated until 1931, changing its name to St. Catherine’s Home in the early 1900s. I have another register from the facility’s final years that I hope to transcribe eventually. The Irish Laundries operated a lot longer; the last one closed in 1996, and there were women alive at the end of the 20th century who remembered living in them. Who were kept as prisoners and abused, whose children were taken away from them and adopted (or sold) to other families, and whose shame kept them from admitting they’d lived in these places. 

The Catholic Church has often made it difficult for families to find out more about their ancestors’ histories in these places, or for families separated by adoption and arguably trafficking to reconnect with their biological kin. We’re fortunate that the Sisters of Mercy have held on to these archives and records, and make them readily available to the public, so researchers like me can shed light on their operations in the U.S..

I’m hoping that, by sharing the names and brief stories attached to them, I can help the descendants of these patients and inmates learn more about them. 

Lines listing Mrs. Swords and her daughter, M.A., on the left; Mary Augusta’s name appears on the right. What is her last name? Binhammer?

Mrs. Swords hoped to rescue Mary Augusta from the Mag, but Mary Augusta stayed with the nuns. She took her first communion on July 22, 1863, and received her Black Badge, a recognition of her dedication to “reforming herself” and also being a good Catholic girl, on July 22, 1864. In January 1868, when probably after she turned 18, she was sent to Mrs. Denis Jordan, likely to become a household servant, as many Magdalen residents and inmates did. 

I haven’t been able to find solid records on her after that. Not being sure of her last name doesn’t help, although many of the people who lived in San Francisco before the 1870s stick around for long. I hope she had a good, happy life. I wish I knew.

Two more books (on disability) I'm excited to read in the coming months, plus some bonus books!

Early this year I wrote about 11 books I was excited to read in 2024, but there were a few I either inadvertently left out or didn’t realize were on the horizon. I’m here to rectify that now.

Above are the covers of two books I’m VERY eager to read. Both deal with the subjects of chronic illness and disability (subjects I experience and think about a lot) in new and complex ways.

1. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom,” Johanna Hedva (Sept. 3, 2024)

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism―a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies―we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal―from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness―relying on and fueling ableism―to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.

2. “The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human,” Sophie Strand (March 4, 2025)

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? 

In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck. 

The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being? 

And some others I inadvertently left out in January:

1. “From Elder to Ancestor: Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life,” S. Kelley Harrell (out now): “This book explains how, through personal introspection and engagement with the living world around us, we can cultivate our unique way to elder well.”

2. “You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music,” Glenn McDonald (out now): “Spotify's former data guru charts how music's digital revolution affects fans and musicians.”

3. “The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing,” Andrea Warner (out now): “An engaging exploration into the enduring popularity of Dirty Dancing and its lasting themes of feminism, activism, and reproductive rights.”

4. “Karaoke Queen,” Dominic Lim (Sept. 17, 2024): “A man hopes his drag queen alter ego will help save a karaoke bar and give him a second chance at love in this joyfully queer rom-com.”

5. “Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory,” Sezin Koehler (March 11, 2025): “Much Ado About Keanu provides the deep dive into his art, identity, and ethnicity that this oft-misunderstood cultural icon deserves.”

Every loop and curl of the journey memorized

I only got my driver’s license the year I turned 19. It was my second semester at Santa Rosa Junior College, and my friends Elizabeth and Maia, who were my ride to school, were leaving for a semester abroad in Paris. The bus from the JC to my tiny Western Sonoma County town only ran every two and a half hours, and stopped running at 4:30 in the afternoon. I had no other option. 

When I learned to drive, it was in a 1971 Mercedes 220 that my dad brought over from Germany after a visit in 1970. Although it was the compact car of its model line, it was heavy — 3,031 pounds of steel body, with no power steering or brakes to help a petite teen like me tame it. Plus, when I learned to drive it, the engine would stall when the car stopped, so I learned to brake with my heel and feather the accelerator with my toe to keep it from dying. But soon, I mastered it. And on hot days, I drove barefoot. 

Although I was late to the driver’s seat, I came to love driving almost immediately, especially on the twisty backroads of Western Sonoma County. Pop a CD into the car stereo — Dead Can Dance, Alice in Chains, Fields of the Nephilim — and swoop along that ribbon of asphalt, deep into the woods, out to the wild Pacific shore. 

Highway 116 west to Goat Rock Beach was one of my favorites, from the drizzly redwood towns of Hacienda and Rio Nido to the cow-dotted fields closer to the coast. Or Bodega Highway west to Highway 1, steep hills rising on either side of the road until it opens out into the quintessential beach town of Bodega Bay, made famous by Alfred Hitchcock and some aggressive seagulls. 

For a while, a friend of mine lived in Joy Woods, west of Occidental, and I loved finding ever-more-obscure ways home from their place: Joy Road to narrow, curvy Bittner Road to Graton Road, with its open fields and pasture land, was a favorite. Or veer off Graton to oak-dotted Harrison Grade Road to Green Valley Road, which more than lived up to its name. I felt safe on those nearly empty roads, trees and more trees guarding me, melancholy music in my ears, body swaying as the car slalomed through the curves. 

There was a skill to it. Slow down and downshift before a sharp turn, then slowly accelerate and shift back up as you come out of it, belly dropping as you pick up speed. Heave the steering wheel like a fisherman in a rising tide. Back then, I pushed the speed limit, ever frustrated with cautious drivers and tourists who didn’t have every loop and curl of the journey memorized. The rule was, if more than five cars were piled up behind you, you needed to pull off, but not everyone obeyed. They slowed me down, interfered with my flow and flight along the road.

When I moved away to attend U.C. Berkeley a few years later, I could still picture those backroad routes in my mind. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d trace them: Joy to Bittner, Bittner to Graton, Graton to 116. Evergreen boughs flashing in my peripheral vision, dappled sun streaming down, painting everything gold. Or high-beams piercing the deep darkness, like something out of a David Lynch project.

I returned recently, but it wasn’t the same. I’m a much more cautious driver now, despite the power steering, and the data signal was too weak to stream more than one or two Dead Can Dance songs before the music cut out. But my feet remembered to slow down before the turn, then rev my way out of it like an aircraft picking up speed. And the narrow, tree-lined pathways still felt like home. 

I am a shade plant

Whenever the conversation turns to weather, especially the heat and scorching sun of summer, I frequently remark that I identify as a shade plant. It’s meant as kind of a joke, but in many ways it isn’t. 

Many who know me are aware that I’m uncomfortable in sun and warm weather. The bright sun hurts my eyes (and can sometimes trigger migraines), and I’m very prone to sunburns and heat exhaustion. It doesn’t help that I rely on multiple medications that make me more sensitive to the sun and heat. 

I’m glad so many people enjoy summer weather. I’m just not one of them. 

I recently returned from a short retreat in the terraces of Monte Rio, where I stayed in a cabin perched on a steep hillside deep in the redwoods. While there I saw very little direct sunlight; all of it was filtered through those deep green canopies, or shaded by tall auburn trunks. When it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the towns nearby, it was more like 80F among the trees, and even cooler indoors. I was able to rest outdoors without feeling like I was being blinded or slowly roasted. 

It was amazing. 

My ancestors must have thrived among the woodlands, whether it was in the lands now known as Germany or Switzerland, Sweden or Norway, Britain or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. From them I inherited eyes made for lower-light discernment, skin that’s at home in the cool, misty air of a shadowed wood. 

Some years ago I learned that there are a number of specific genes associated with red-headedness. Some of them lead to bright, coppery hair while others lend a more subtle redness; I love that my particular hair color matches the hue of redwood bark. 

These genetic differences originate in the Central Asian grasslands, and are associated with a different kind of melanin, sometimes considered a malfunctioning form of melanin, called pheomelanin. It’s why so many of us burn instead of tan, and it’s why we develop clusters of freckles rather than tanning evenly. Unfortunately, it also makes us less able to absorb Vitamin D from the sun and more likely to develop skin cancer. These days I think of those inscriptions in my yearbook — “have a good summer! Get a tan!” — with scorn. 

Often, redheads also need more anesthetic during dental and surgical procedures, as my dermatologist recently reminded me while removing an unevenly shaped bump from my arm (a biopsy revealed it was benign). 

For whatever reason, our culture worships summer and abhors winter. But we’re not all alike. To go back to plants: If you give them all the same things, most will die. Succulents often want lots of sunlight and very little water. Ferns love deep shade and cool, humid air (hi, kin). Some plants want only distilled water; others are happy with used dishwater. It’s silly to expect every person to love the summer sun and hate rainy, cloudy or cool weather. Hopefully we can all find ways to plant ourselves where we are happiest. 

Origin story: Trina Robbins (1938-2024)

Yesterday, Trina Robbins, the legendary comic artist, graphic novelist and historian — who was also one of my mentors and role models — died. You can read more about her incredible life in this New York Times obituary; the gift link will expire May 11, 2024. 

I first learned about Trina in my early teens, when Eclipse Comics moved into the house across the street from ours in Forestville, California. I think there must’ve been an article in the local paper, saying that Trina was launching a new comic, California Girls, with Eclipse, and was seeking fashion designs from readers, especially young readers. 

At the time, I was drawing a comic of my own (inspired by my classmate, Mark; you can see some of his characters here). It was about a rock band called Zoo, where all of the members were different animals. I sent Trina some sketches featuring two Zoo members modeling different outfits. Much to my surprise and excitement, she included one of my designs in issue 5, and also featured me as “designer of the month.” 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Click on the photos above to see them larger.

It was my first time being published, and I still remember the thrill of it clearly. Although I was already writing constantly at the time, this was a milestone that gave me the confidence to keep going. In future years, I joined my high school’s newspaper staff, co-founded a newsletter with our environmental club, and published the school’s literary magazine my senior year. I’ve been a writer and journalist ever since. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Pages from California Girls #5, featuring the prairie dress I designed.

Also, I love that the design Trina chose was my “prairie dress.” If you’ve been following my work in recent years, you know I’ve never stopped dreaming of the perfect prairie dress. (See my video here.)

A lot changes in a year or two in a teenager’s life. Just before I turned 16, I discovered Jim Morrison and became obsessed. I bought a copy of “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” the biography of Jim’s life by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, and inhaled it. Among its pages I found a familiar name: Trina Robbins. She and Jim apparently had a brief friendship and sexual relationship. I wrote to her, asking if she was the Trina Robbins in the book. She wrote back and said yes. 

At the time they met, Trina was a fashion designer whose creations caught the eye of musicians like Mama Cass, David Crosby and Donovan. She also opened a clothing boutique, called Broccoli, in New York. According to the biography, Jim started hanging around the shop and he and Trina got to know each other. I was incredibly jealous, but did my best to be respectful. I asked Trina whether she had ever thought about writing about her experiences with him. She said she had, but she didn’t want to feel like she was monetizing the relationship like others were doing. I remember having so much respect for that stance, even though here was someone who had all these juicy details I wanted to know about. 

In early college, I turned the tables by profiling Trina in the Santa Rosa Junior College newspaper, The Oak Leaf, giving her a two-page spread with many of her drawings. She’d just released her book A Century of Women Cartoonists. It was then that I began to learn more about her life as a pioneering woman artist in the male-dominated comics world of the 1960s and 1970s, and the fact that, in 1985, she became the first woman ever to draw Wonder Woman. 

Once social media rolled around, I reconnected with Trina, especially on Facebook and Instagram. I realized we both lived in San Francisco, and we met up one time for lunch at Crepevine on Church Street; it turned out she lived about a block away, in a house she’d bought for next to nothing in the 1970s. It was incredible to finally meet and talk with this woman who’d been such a huge part of my teen life. Now, I imagine all the other people she inspired and mentored, and I’m in awe. 

I’ve only just discovered that, in 2017, Trina did release a memoir of her life, which includes at least some of her stories about Jim Morrison. I’ve just ordered it, and I can’t wait for it to arrive. 

Rest in power, Trina. You gave us all so much. 

Corrections and connections from "San Francisco's Forgotten Cemeteries"

Odd Fellows Cemetery, 1900s. (wnp15.208; Courtesy of a Private Collector).

Writing a book is always an imperfect process. Most authors do our best to get all our facts straight before a book goes to press, but frequently find out later that we got something wrong, or didn’t have all of the information we needed. 

I’ve learned a few such tidbits since “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” came out almost 6 months ago, and thought it would be fun to share them here.

In the chapter on City Cemetery (where the Lincoln Park Golf Course and the Legion of Honor Museum operate today), I wrote about Thomas Wood, a military man who served in the Mexican-American War before taking his own life in San Francisco in early 1882. I — and other local cemetery historians — assumed Wood’s grave remained at City Cemetery to this day. 

Clipping: The Arizona Sentinel, Yuma, Arizona, 04 Mar 1882.

However, another researcher, Alex Ryder, recently discovered that after the San Francisco Call wrote about Wood and the sad state of affairs at City Cemetery in February 1882, Wood’s body was exhumed and reburied in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, on the western slope of Lone Mountain. At the time, this would have been seen as a more respectable spot for a veteran than the Potter’s Field at the desolate edge of the city. But it probably wasn’t Wood’s last move. The Odd Fellows Cemetery was largely dug up and relocated to a plot in Colma’s Greenlawn Cemetery in 1932. 

We know that at least a handful of Odd Fellows graves were left behind, but most of its 26,000 occupants now rest in Colma. Unfortunately, their plot has, in the past 100 years, been separated from the rest of Greenlawn by a large Best Buy retail store and parking lot. Before that, a United Artists 6 movie theater sat on the same site. 

Today, the Odd Fellows reburial site is a weedy, fenced-off lot with a single, broken monument commemorating about as many dead as the population of El Cerrito or Eureka. In my book, I wrote that they were all in a single mass grave. I’ve since learned that the Odd Fellows remains were reburied carefully, each one with a small marker with some identifying information on it. Unfortunately, those markers have since been broken or moved, making it difficult to determine who is buried where. 

Thomas Wood might have had an easier rest if he’d been left in City Cemetery.

Jewish Cemeteries, on the land that’s Dolores Park today.

I also reported in the book, based on faulty source material, that the Jewish cemeteries in today’s Dolores Park contained about 600 graves, but that wasn’t correct. It turns out they held somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 graves. All those graves are now in Colma, as far as anyone knows. Thanks to Judi Leff for the correction. 

Lastly, this isn’t so much a correction as a nifty connection. In the section on Sailor’s Burying Ground, one of San Francisco’s earliest settler cemeteries, I write about British seaman James Anderson, who died aboard the USS Congress in July 1847 and was buried in Sailor’s the next time the Congress docked in San Francisco. 

This wasn’t the Congress’ first time in San Francisco; it wasn’t even the first Congress. This second iteration, built in Maine in 1842, was the flagship of the Mexican-American war from 1846 to 1848, a conflict that ties Thomas Wood, James Anderson, and many other newcomers to San Francisco together. Back to my point: Nine months earlier, the Congress docked in San Francisco, in October 1846, to bring California’s new Governor, Robert F. Stockton, to visit the tiny village of Yerba Buena on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Stockton was also the Commodore of the Congress from July 1846 until his retirement from the U.S. Navy in 1850, making it possible that he and James Anderson crossed paths, or even that they were on board together when Anderson died. 

The Congress, for her part, served as a flagship in Brazil before joining the Union Army during the Civil War. She met her end in March 1862; while anchored off the coast of Virginia, she was attacked by the Confederate USS Virginia. She slipped her moorings, ran aground, and was destroyed by the ensuing fire and explosions. Governor Stockton died in Princeton, New Jersey, in October 1866, and is buried in Princeton Cemetery. 

Folk art of my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors

Detail from Twenty-Four Original Barn Stars, Surveys of Berks, Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Montgomery Counties. Photo: of Patrick J. Donmoyer.

One of my favorite things about learning about my ancestors is discovering ones with whom I share similar traits. For example, my 10th great-grandfather, Dirck Goris Storm, was a skilled writer who penned a history of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Last year, I discovered a creative streak on another branch of my family tree. 

It started with a little zine from Leodrune Press that mentioned Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, particularly barn stars (often called “hex signs” by outsiders). I knew that a number of my ancestors immigrated from Germany to Pennsylvania; although some of them were Mennonites who probably wouldn’t have engaged in barn decoration, not all of them were. So, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any barn star motifs particular to my ancestors or the places they lived. 

I quickly learned that barn-star styles are determined much more by the artist than by the family that hires someone to paint their barns. There’s a popular misconception that these stars were painted on barns to keep witches away (hence “hex signs”) and protect the livestock inside. Instead, they’re more likely inspired by celestial themes that were common among the Pennsylvania Dutch, both before and after they came to the United States. Other patterns of shapes, such as flowers and hearts, are also common. 

(That being said, farmers did hire folk magicians — practitioners of Brauche/Braucherei or “Powwow” — to bless and protect their barns and livestock, and to perform healing spells for sick cattle and other animals. Petitions written on small slips of paper were occasionally found tucked into barn walls and other places, reflecting this practice.)

John Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1789. 01.13.18.

I didn’t find any barn stars specifically associated with my ancestors, but did find something else: An intricately carved and detailed dower chest made by one of my ancestors’ brothers and nephews. 

My 6th great-grandfather, Conrad Bieber, was born in 1725, probably in Germany. He immigrated to Pennsylvania sometime before 1743. Conrad’s father, Johannes, was also born in Germany and arrived in Pennsylvania in 1739. Conrad had a brother, Jacob, born in 1731 before the family immigrated. 

While Conrad moved to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1750s to join a Mennonite community there, along with his wife, Maria Magdalena Kneisley, Jacob remained in Pennsylvania, specifically in the Oley Hills area of Berks County, and began a woodworking business with his son, John. I knew I had ancestors from the Oley Hills area, and when I searched for the location and the name Bieber, these beautiful wooden chests popped up. 

An article in Reading Eagle about one of the chests reads, “Thinking that John or Jacob Bieber made a mistake with his compass drawing of a perpendicular hex sign, we noticed that this unusual designed chest had six edelweiss flowers sprouting from three white flat hearts on each corner of the dower chest with the elaborate tulip shaped escutcheon design in the middle. They were not barn stars, but an edelweiss flower theme which spread their flower like petals standing upright in each cheek of the flat hearts! A native Rhineland symbol of love used by John Bieber in the 1780s on his dower chests.”

Jacob Bieber, Johann Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1776. 01.24.22.

A very similar chest is in the Barnes Foundation Collection in Philadelphia. Another similar one, made for Magdalena Leabelsperger, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (I have a 6th great-grandmother named Magdalena Lionsberger, but her birth and death dates are different from the ones associated with this chest). The Barnes collection also has this Bieber chest, which has some different motifs but is clearly from the same makers. 

Although I’ve never been a woodworker, seeing this level of artistry and skill makes my heart glad. It’s an honor — and also reassuring — to know I come from people who enjoyed making beautiful things with their hands. 

11 books I'm excited to read in 2024

I love reading, and I do a lot of it. I’m the rare person who gets sleepy while reading, so I read every night to help myself get to sleep. If you’d like to see what I read in 2023, you view those books here. I read all of the books I was looking forward to in 2023 (and many more) , with the exception of “Right Hand” by Natalie Zina Walschots, only because it hasn’t come out yet.

A lot of my fellow writers are releasing new books in 2023, and these are the ones I’m excited to read, plus two more from authors I don’t know (Gabe Cole Novoa and Heather Fawcett). I hope you’ll check out everything listed below.

1. “Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix,” Gabe Cole Novoa (Jan. 16): “A trans boy searches for a future―and a romance―in which he can live and love openly as himself in this heartrending young-adult reimagining of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, part of the Remixed Classics series.”

2. “Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands,” Heather Fawcett (Jan. 16): (I read the first book in this series in 2023, and it was one of my favorites of the year): “When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late, in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.”

3. “Breath by Breath,” Stephanie Wildman (Jan 23): “In this bedtime story, twins Flor and Roberto wonder how they can possibly go on an adventure at the same time as they go to sleep. Big brother Luis guides them in an exercise through their bodies, from the top of their heads to the tips of their toes. Following the gentle inhale and exhale of their breath, Flor and Roberto find love and calm inside and all around them as they drift off to sleep. Bonus content provides direction for mapping your own body scan.” Also, don’t miss Stephanie’s books “Ghost Writer” in September and “Miri’s Moving Day” in November.

4. “Tough Broad,” Caroline Paul (March 5): I’m so lucky that three books by authors I love and admire are releasing on my birthday! “Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren’t women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age? Tough Broad is her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body, but why we must.”

5. “The Translator’s Daughter,” Grace Loh Prasad (March 5): “Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.”

6. “Island Rule,” Katie M. Flynn (March 5): “An angry mother turns into a literal monster. A company in San Francisco can scrub your entire reputation and create a new one…for a price. A failed actor on a reality show turns into an unlikely world savior. And much more. Through each of these twelve interconnected stories, Katie Flynn masterfully blends people, places, and even realities. From a powerful and “radiant” (Kassandra Montag, author of After the Flood) new literary voice to be reckoned with, this collection will stay with you after turn the final page.”

7. “Relative Strangers,” A.H. Kim (April 2): “From the acclaimed author of A Good Family comes a timely spin on Sense and Sensibility, a twenty-first-century family drama featuring two half-Korean sisters, their ex-hippie mother, multiple messy love affairs and one explosive secret that could ruin everything.”

8. “Sing, I” Ethel Rohan (April 15): “Inside Half Moon Bay, a sparkling California coastal town, Ester Prynn is dulled and diminished by struggles with work, money, marriage, her senile father, a troubled teenage son, and old guilt she can’t assuage. When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, he upends her fraught life and propels her toward passions buried, like singing; desires discovered, like a same-sex infatuation; and wrongs righted, like bringing the violent assailant to justice. But as the armed robber commits new crimes and continues to evade capture, the trauma from the holdup climbs, threatening Ester’s newfound delights and longings and forcing her to contend with her burning regrets and what-ifs. In the reckoning between Ester and these growing, molten upsets, she’s faced with enormous choices and must determine what and who can bring her to her best life.”

9. “Portrait of a Woman,” Bridget Quinn (April 16): “Discover the story of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—a long-ignored artist and feminist of eighteenth-century France—in this imaginative and illuminating biography from an award-winning writer.”

10. “Your Presence is Mandatory,” Sasha Vasilyuk (April 23): “A riveting debut novel, based on real events, about a Ukrainian World War II veteran with a secret that could land him in the Gulag, and his family who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them.”

11. “Karaoke Queen,” Dominic Lim (Sept. 17): “Rising star Dominic Lim presents a joyous queer second-chance romance about a man who must work with his ex to save their beloved karaoke bar, perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Alexis Hall.”

If you’d like to see everything on my “want to read” list, you can find that here.

Doing book events as a disabled and neurodivergent person

When my book “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” came out at the end of August, I was lucky to be able to do lots of events around the city to promote it. Over the course of two months, I had six “in conversation”-style events and three readings, plus a couple of podcast recordings, and most of them were in person. 

Most authors will tell you that the book-publicity cycle is exhausting and grueling, even when it’s also a lot of fun — after all, you’re getting to talk in depth about a topic you’re really passionate about. But I also have chronic pain/illnesses and sensory sensitivities (and I’m an introvert), so I knew this process would probably be very hard on me. 

Before planning my schedule, I paid a lot of attention to what other chronically ill and/or neurodivergent authors have advised, and I did my best to create a schedule that would work for me. I’d like to share a little of what I learned ahead of time, what I did, and how it went. 

Johanna Hedva is an artist and musician, and the author of several books, as well as an outspoken advocate for accessibility and disability justice. Their disability access rider, which creates an accessible space for themself as well as for their audience, can be found here. 

A couple of items in Hedva’s rider stood out to be as potentially very useful in my circumstance. They write, “I require at least 48 hours after arriving to acclimate before I can participate in any public events. I’ll need to fly home the day after the event.” I wasn’t flying anywhere, but this tipped me off to the idea that I should try to book a day of recovery/rest after each event, where possible. In practice, it turned out that I really needed to rest the day before (and day of) the event, plus two days after. 

Ultimately, I tried to schedule my events about a week apart. On top of my personal health needs, I’m a partner and a mom (of a kid who started high school two weeks before my book launched!), and I needed to stay on top of those responsibilities as well. 

For the most part, that schedule allowed me enough time between events to recover and feel ready for the next one. It also allowed me, in one case, to take on an additional event that was very worthwhile, in terms of getting word out about the book. On the downside, I wound up with three events that week — and it was the same week my cat had to be hospitalized after eating something toxic. It was rough!

Hedva also writes, “I require all of the below to be confirmed and agreed upon by contract at least three weeks before the event takes place. Trust me, the more time there is to work out all the logistics, the better.” Inspired by this, I set up my event schedule fairly far in advance, so that once I was in the thick of things, I would know where to show up and when, and not have to worry about logistics anymore. One event was still in flux up until about a week beforehand, and another popped up just a couple of weeks before it happened. That was an extra cognitive burden, but having my schedule mostly set far in advance really helped. 

For one event, I had been to the venue before and knew that the overhead LED lighting might give me a migraine. I asked the event coordinator if they could work with me to lower the lighting, and they did. 

Another helpful guide for me is the one that author Katherine May (“Wintering,” “Enchantment”) put together, particularly to protect her needs as an autistic person. I find almost all of her accommodations for online and in-person events to be incredibly helpful for me. 

While I didn’t specifically request any of May’s suggestions from the venues where I appeared, they were important for me to keep in mind as I decided when to show up before an event, whether to mingle or rest beforehand, and so on. Unlike May, I find that showing up a bit early is helpful for me, particularly if I don’t already know a venue well, so that I can get acclimated to the space before other people begin arriving. 

Even with all these plans in place, I was still exhausted for a day or two after each event, I dealt with some brain fog and lack of executive function after events, and my throat was usually sore from reading and talking more than usual. In a couple of cases, I really should have asked for a chair at the book-selling table, so that I could sit while selling books and talking to readers. If I stand for long periods, I often get light-headed and my legs will hurt, but I sometimes got so caught up in things that I wasn’t paying attention to my body. 

And, after all that, it took about a month for me to get back to baseline energy levels, where I felt like I could do new work again. 

May writes, “Not everyone will be able to ask for accommodations like these — and also … I won’t always get them, despite asking. But I think it’s important to use my relative privilege to ask anyway. Hopefully it will begin to raise awareness amongst journalists and organisers of the kind of needs autistic people have.” 

I wish that I felt like I could have gone further and requested the kinds of accessibility that Hedva and others require, such as sign language interpreters online and in person, and live captioning for online events. But none of my events were paid, and only one was ticketed, to cover the cost of renting the venue. And currently, most venues don’t have the costs of interpreters or captioners built into their event budgets. They should, but we’re not there yet.

I’m grateful that I was mostly able to set up a schedule that was sustainable and accessible for me. I hope this is helpful for others who deal with similar differences and limitations.