by Karen Mireau, Contributor
Editor's Note: Karen Mireau, a Sonoma County resident, has published over 100 diverse titles – including novels, poetry, picture books and numerous memoirs. The following article shares her genealogical discoveries while publishing two memoirs about the Bay Area Chabot family.
As a publisher of memoirs, I am often led down paths I could never anticipate. One morning in 2024, it was a brief email that sparked a year-long literary adventure – one that also revealed a family mystery begging to be solved.
The email wondered if I was the publisher of a book about the heiress, feminist, and philanthropist Emily Chabot. Indeed, I was. Coincidentally, I was in the midst of preparing a reissue of that book, as well as writing one about her great-granddaughter, Lucy Rau Ferguson.
The author of that email, genealogist Pat Gallagher, was in possession of several cardboard boxes that held photographs, letters and ephemera about the Chabot family that had been rescued from an abandoned storage unit in Oakland. Was there any possibility that I might be interested in them? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?
It wasn’t long before I was at Pat’s doorstep, collecting what proved to be a treasure trove of family photos and original documents such as wills, appraisals of jewelry and furniture, and stacks of handwritten letters between members of the Chabot family. I was in memoir heaven!
The information in those boxes, dating from the 1800s, was invaluable and it allowed me to complete both books. It also raised the question of what had happened to the Chabot fortune. It was then that another email arrived. This time it was from a man who had purchased Lucy’s home after her death. In their basement were two cardboard boxes that looked like they might hold old photographs and letters, and would I be interested in them? By now you know my answer.
The moral of this story is that it never hurts to take a good long look at what is in your basement, garage, or attic before you throw things away – especially if they appear to be just ordinary cardboard boxes.
