Product Description
Let history come alive with real people and real historical events interwoven with imaginative stories! Although based on genealogical and historical facts, Iowa Born and Bred is part history and part novel, where thoughts, feelings and life-changing events shape the lives of those in the story, as well as the lives of descendants that follow.

Maria Kellar Nelson was born in 1860 on a farm in Iowa. Her father was a farmer, preacher and inventor. Maria married Peter Nelson, an immigrant from Denmark, in the Dakota Territory and moved to northwest Iowa, raising five children there. When in his early twenties, her second oldest son, Martin Lyle, headed east to Chicago where he received over one hundred patents for his inventions. Meanwhile, Maria and Peter went west to California.

In 1949, Maria Nelson’s great-granddaughter got on the Union Pacific in Chicago and traveled alone to California to visit the great-grandmother she had never met. This is the second in Carol Troestler’s historical novels about her great-grandmothers, the first being Flow On Sweet Missouri. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband where she raised six children and owned a mental health center.

Cover design by Susan Anderson