In Search of Susanna

By Suzanne L. Bunkers,
Foreword by Albert E. Stone

Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography

270 pages, 27 photos, 1996
$26.00 paper, 0-87745-538-4, 978-0-87745-538-7

“In Search of Susanna is a lovely weaving together of threads from the ancestral past to tell a story of the present and future. The Susanna sought in this book—and beautifully evoked—is not only Suzanne Bunkers' great-great-grandmother but the author and her daughter as well. No one restores to us the lives of women across generations as gracefully and as movingly as Suzanne Bunkers.”—James Olney, Southern Review

“Bunkers discovers that her own experience mothering a daughter outside of marriage provides the guiding thread through tangled webs of family secrets, village history, motherhood and daughterhood, legitimacy and illegitimacy. The reader accompanies her on her quest until the center of a mystery that is as personal as it is familial is attained: Bunkers' affinity with her nineteenth-century foremother.”—Annis Pratt, author of Dancing with Goddesses

“In Search of Susanna is a compelling quest story in which Bunkers moves between Iowa and Luxembourg in search of not only her great-great-grandmother, Susanna, and family roots but her own self-identity as (great) granddaughter, daughter, scholar, single parent, mother. Growing pains, humility, and pride of accomplishment are reflected in family snapshots, an assemblage of chance and discovery that Bunkers resurrects and arranges with art, grace, and understanding.”—Lynn Z. Bloom, University of Connecticut

“In Search of Susanna is a remarkable transgeneric experience in life writing, a densely textured 'word quilt' in Bunkers' words, testifying to the author's passionate determination not only to reclaim her family past but to reaffirm a vital future for the female descendants who look back to Susanna and discover themselves.”—William L. Andrews, University of Kansas

“History repeats itself in this fascinating story of genealogical detection. Suzanne's search for Susanna highlights the autobiographical imperative so often latent in the writing of biography. Bunkers skillfully weaves her own story of a Roman Catholic girlhood into the larger contexts of family history, social history, mid-ninetenth-century West European immigration to the American Midwest, and contemporary returns to ancestral roots.”—Susan Stanford Friedman

On a summer day in 1980 in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, Suzanne Bunkers pored over parish records of her maternal ancestors, immigrants to the rural American Midwest in the mid 1800s. Suddenly, chance led her to the name Simmerl and to the missing piece in the genealogical puzzle that had brought her so far: Susanna Simmerl, Bunkers' paternal great-great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1856 before coming to America. Finding Susanna was the catalyst for Bunkers' intensely personal book, which blends history, memory, and imagination into a drama of two women's lives within their multigenerational family.

Suzanne Bunkers is professor of English at Mankato State University. She is the editor of The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1834-1863 and the author of "All Will Yet Be Well": The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873-1952 (IOWA, 1993).

Content

Foreword by Allen E. Stone
Acknowledments

I. In Search of Susanna
2. My Luxembourg across the Sea
3. In the Name of the Father
4. Forget Me Not… Remember Me
5. A Sense of Place
6. Annunciation
7. One Step at a Time
8. Divide the Living Child in Two
9. The Good Mother
10. Family Secrets
11. In the Name of the Mother
12. Our Unescapable Common Source

Conclusion: A Vibrating Web of Connection
Appendix: Genealogies

Autobiography    Women's Studies