Several years ago I wrote an article for a local newspaper. The pay wasn’t great, but the topic was. It was based on my finding an old photo of a member of the Roosevelt Family. Of course, I recognized the famous last name, but the first name eluded me. My writer’s instincts kicked in and after some research, I discovered that the photo was taken in 1884 and depicted a woman named Kate Roosevelt, whose husband Hilborne was President Theodore Roosevelt’s first cousin as well as a world-renowned organ maker and inventor who collaborated with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell before his untimely death in 1886.
The article I wrote was about Kate and Hilborne’s wedding day in 1883, described in the New York Times as the “Wedding of the year.” I filed the story and thought that was the last time I would be researching this branch of the Roosevelt Family, but a phone call from my editor changed my plans and for the next two years, I was given the opportunity to edit the diary of Mrs. Kate Roosevelt (1912-1919). The owner of the diary had seen my article and remembered an old trunk that was left to her by a distant relative who turned out to be Mrs. Roosevelt’s grandson. The diary was fragile and valuable. Its owner, Edith, offered me the opportunity to come to her house and transcribe whatever details I found interesting. Every Tuesday for the next two years, I went to her home, sat at her kitchen table and soaked-up every word Mrs. Roosevelt had written more than one hundred years before. We began calling our meetings, “Tuesdays with Edith.”
Kate Roosevelt became a friend, someone I looked forward to spending one afternoon a week with and when I had finished editing her diary, I found it hard to say good-by. I needed to decide what to do with all of her intimate and historic musings that included her dislike for Cousin Teddy’s politics, her opposition to suffrage, her visits to Oyster Bay and most interesting of all, her metamorphosis from New York City socialite to staunch supporter of and active volunteer during World War One.
So I wrote another story, this time about my meeting Mrs. Roosevelt in that crinkled old photo and decided it would be the first chapter of a book I planned to write called the Dowager’s Diary. I presented the idea of turning these diary entries into a weekly blog to the editor of a website called Woman Around Town and she loved it. The Dowager’s Diary posts every Thursday at www.womanaroundtown.com and has been “reverently” referred to as “New York City’s Downton Abbey,” a slice of city life seen through the eyes and experiences of Kate Roosevelt.
Thanks to the discipline that goes into writing and researching a weekly blog, the Dowager’s Diary is on track for publication in 2016 and through it, I have been met many members of the Roosevelt Family now living, who are eager to share their stories. And thanks to a freelance story that promised a small sum, a book was born.