A young woman immigrates to New York from Ireland at the turn of the 20th century. Starting a new life, or escaping an old one? But living in a tenement in New York City in the early 1900’s is worth escaping too, so she answers a newspaper ad from a man in San Francisco, who is searching for a wife and mother for his young daughter. You would think that could be a recipe for disaster, but things are going pretty well, right up until the day of the San Francisco earthquake. The plot is much more complicated, and I don’t want to give too much away, but the earthquake is almost used as a plot device.
Sophie and her step-daughter, Kat, survive the earthquake, and are able to leave the city within a few days. The descriptions of the quake, the fire, and conditions in the city are described in detail, but not dwelt on. Sophie goes back to the city a few times, and sees the reconstruction as well. You definitely get a sense of what it would have been like to live through the quake. One of the more poignant parts is when she leaves a note on a bulletin board to try to find her friend. When she goes back to see if there has been a response, someone else has used the back of her note to post their own. People were that desperate to find family that they were willing to compromise the ability of other people to find theirs.
Through the course of the book, as we learn about different parts of Sophie’s life, the reader gets a glimpse of life in Ireland, in tenements in New York City, in an upper-middle class neighborhood in San Francisco, and we even visit a sanitarium in the desert. The plot is fairly complicated; suffice it to say, Martin, the man Sophie marries, is not who he claims to be. Part of the story involves the constraints on women at the time; Sophie does not feel able to question Martin about his job. Class distinctions are also obvious, especially with Sophie’s neighbor.
If this was your family, how would you research them? Sophie finds her husband’s birth certificate, and several other vital records, when she searches his desk. Fortunately, she takes them out of the desk, so they are not in the house when it is burned to the ground in the fire after the quake. Records lost to natural, or man-made, disasters are a challenge for researchers. In Sophie’s case, if she needed to get copies of the records, she could have written to the county clerks in the counties who issued the documents in the first place. Another character in the story does just that. We are fortunate to have the internet, which makes searching easier, if the records exists and are online. We might still occasionally have to do some searching in person, however!