Quite a few years ago, I inherited a ton of old family photographs going all the way back into the 1800s, with most being from 1910s through to the 1960s, covering multiple generations of one side of my family. One of the main characters in this massive pictorial narrative is my great-grandmother, Mata. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914 and went on to pursue teaching.
This took her to a few various small towns to teach in small schools in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1919, she found herself out west in Libby, Montana teaching English, whose population was 1,500 at the time, having only within the past decade more than doubled in size.
Mata kept a diary during her time in Libby, expressing a disillusionment with teaching as a profession that she had been feeling for a long time. The pages of this diary were found unbounded and scattered, but I was able to piece it back together and make a makeshift binding for it.
In the end, Mata’s stay in Libby was brief: only about a year, and she moved on to another location. This post is really just an excuse to share some of the photos that probably wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise. There might be more photos of Libby among the photos, but when I received the photos, they were all mixed together: all locations and time periods jumbled with few captions to help. Whenever I can match some together, I’ll make some more posts here. And whenever possible, I want to give local museums or archives digital copies of photos showing their area.
unpublishedhistory 