Mendocino County Museum presents a special two-part program led by guest author and historian Kim Bancroft.

Saturday January 21, 1:00-3:00 pm, Author Talk and Tea. The public is cordially invited to join Kim Bancroft for an author talk and afternoon tea at the Mendocino County Museum. Bancroft will discuss her book, Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters. The book narrates the story of the two wives of Bancroft's historian and collector great-great-grandfather and how these women portrayed their lives from the 1860s to the 1890s in the San Francisco Bay Area. Guests are encouraged to wear Victorian attire, along with Kim herself.

Saturday February 18, 1:00-3:00 pm, Legacy and Memoir: Writing Workshop. With Bancroft’s assistance, aspiring writers and historians will discuss crafting their own stories. Bancroft will provide insight based on her years of experience as a historian and author, and will offer guidance for using letters, diaries, oral history interviews, and other primary sources in one’s writing.   

Event tickets will be $7.00 for adults, $3.00 for children 17 and under, and will include admission to the Museum on the day of the event. Writing Workshop space is limited, to ensure a place we encourage guests to register in advance.

For more information, please visit www.mendocinocounty.org/museum or contact the Mendocino County Museum at (707) 459-2736 or museum@mendocinocounty.org.

About the Author 

Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. She has taught at various high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. Kim has edited and co-written several memoirs. In 2014 Heyday Books published Kim’s edited version of Literary Industries, the 1890 autobiography of her great-great-grandfather, the founder of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Also in 2014, she completed The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Kim is currently looking for a publisher of a book she co-wrote with an old school friend, David Waddell, called Same School, Different Class: A Dual Memoir of School Integration. Learn more about Kim and her work at https://www.kimbancroft.com/.

More about Writing Themselves into History:

“In the early years of California’s statehood, Emily Brist Ketchum Bancroft (1834–1869) and Matilda Coley Griffing Bancroft (1848–1910) had front-row seats to the unfolding of the Golden State’s history. The first and second wives of historian extraordinaire Hubert Howe Bancroft, these two women were deeply engaged members of society and perceptive chroniclers of their times, and they left behind extensive records of their lives and work. Writing Themselves into History offers a rich immersion in nineteenth-century California, detailing Emily’s and Matilda’s experiences with public life, motherhood, and business against the backdrop of San Francisco’s high society and the state’s growth amidst the tumult of the American Civil War. The book also highlights Matilda’s significant involvement in Hubert Howe’s trailblazing research on the history of the American West—including her work collecting oral histories from women members of the LDS Church—and her evocative descriptions of travels throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.” – Courtesy of Heyday Books