This was an awesome read! It's amazing what this frontier woman lived through and accomplished. Margarita "Margaret" Basler was born in1818 in Switzerland and is the matriarch around whom this book is written. She married Johann Adam Reiss in 1840 and had five children--Frank, Charles, Martin, Catherine and Barbara, who was stillborn. They also raised an older son, John, born to Adam's first wife who died in childbirth. They lived on a 120-acre farm in St. Clair County, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, which Adam had purchased from the government as first-owner in 1838, Adam died of cholera in 1849. Margaret, now a single mom aged 30, with five kids under age 11 and living on a farm in a 300 square foot log cabin with a dirt floor, then married Conrad Ebert a year later. They had two more daughters. Margaret died at age 83 in 1902 on the family farm, which, by then, was owned by her son Frank. Margaret was a terrific role model and sounding board for her younger siblings. Each of them tells their own unique story in the letters sent to this family matriarch. It is Margarets' life as the big sister of seven and mother of seven that is described in the 780 letters from 1852-1888 she saved and that are printed, with the editor's commentary, in this book.