
Mary Jaffe (neé Scott)
- Historical Fiction Author -
Mary Quigley's Da

A personal tragedy of an Irish Immigrant caught on the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War + Companion Reading Packets
In 1849, half-brothers Michael and Joseph Quigley arrive with their family of ten in America seeking relief from the Irish potato famine. Their dying father tasked Michael to watch over Joe. Five of the family succumb to illness. In short time, nineteen-year-old Michael heads into the frontier with eleven-year-old Joseph. After arriving in Independence, Missouri, Joe runs away from his stone mason brother. He spends his teen years in the wild cow town of West Bottoms, where his entrepreneurial savvy propels him into a successful business until a worldwide depression sends him scrambling.
Joe meets and marries another Irish Catholic, Mary McManus, who comes from a family of higher ilk. The unlikely couple settles in a frontier riddled with lawless violence, which leaves them burned out by Jayhawkers. Natural catastrophes, failed crops, Joe’s military service, and illnesses overburden them, but it is a shocking, single event that leads to the destruction of Joe’s family.
Through the eyes of nine-year-old Little Mary Quigley—Joe and Mary’s second-born daughter—we observe the ultimate, horrific moment that leaves Mary and her five siblings orphaned. This particular act becomes their dark family secret and leaves a lamentable legacy that has waited generations to be revealed.
Reading Companion Packets
Both packets are a companion set for a serious reader interested in understanding the history, issues and characters.
Book Club Packet
The Book Club Packet includes handouts for leaders and readers, tips on the art of asking questions, and a guided reading section with a review of the elements of literature to help readers organize and focus their thinking. After teaching for 35 years, I know that guided reading is the most enriched. There are also suggested themes of the many possible and specific to Mary Quigley’s Da, as well as an invitation to your Club.
Bibliography of Sources
Every family genealogist writing about distant ancestors knows that no story comes out of a vacuum. Without knowing national or local history, you may not know what families' lives were like before, during and after they arrived. You'll want to put "two and two together”. The Introduction includes guidance and thoughts about revealing painful truths and family secrets. It provides warnings about research challenges in resource. The bibliography is especially important for those writing about the Irish in any century. It includes specific and not widely-known history that explains life in New York, Missouri, or Kansas and why your Irish and German relatives went there in the mid-1800’s. It includes sources about the Civil War and the involvement of the Catholic Church that might provide clues and insights to tracking immigrant and nonimmigrant movement on the frontier. For over a decade, I have encountered invaluable resources in research, and they are included here.



Reviews
Mary Jaffe (neé Scott)

Mary Jaffe (neé Scott)
Mary Jaffe (neé Scott) dreamed of becoming a National Geographic journalist, but it was a dream unrealized--even though she spent her entire eighth grade summer sleeping outdoors along a river, in the woods with the bears, in a barn, in lightening storms, etc. to determine if she was made of the right stuff.
Now, at age seventy-five--after thirty-five years of teaching elementary, adolescent and prison inmate students; raising her family as a single mother; singing professional opera; and caring for her beloved terminally ill husband for more than a decade--she has turned to writing historical fiction.
She successfully completed a six-generation genealogy of her father’s Scott family from Robert Scott, Lord of Arras of the last Scottish Parliament to his most recent descendant born in the 1870’s. She gutted a cargo van, converted it to a camper (learning from the “University of YouTube”), and travelled from her home in Washington to Bucks Co., Pennsylvania to follow the migration of those descendants.
Mary Quigley’s Da took many years of research. Now she is working on a set of novelettes set in 1600 Ireland. She plans to shortly begin work on a story about her children’s 3rd great grandmother who, post Civil War, sued her master’s estate to gain ownership of his Texas plantation from his brother. All of her stories are based on her or her children’s ancestors’ lives.
Stay tuned!
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