- Today we are pleased to introduce Jennifer Van Haaften as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. As an elementary student, Jennifer Van Haaften's grandmother gave her a copy of the book "On the Banks of Plum Creek," by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That book sparked a love of history and the career she has today. In college, she realized she could make money demonstrating historic life at living history farms in Des Moines, Iowa. After earning her bachelor's degree in history at the University of Northern Iowa, her master's in history at the University of Manchester, and her master's in historical administration at Eastern Illinois University, she continued to work in museums. For 10 years she was Associate Director of Historical Programs and Resources at Old World Wisconsin. There, among other projects, she directed the annual month-long World of Little House event, giving every visitor a chance to live like Laura. Since 2015, she has been Assistant Director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. And for all she has accomplished, that day she became a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan has come full circle with her article about Laura Ingalls Wilder's family ties in Wisconsin titled, "Re-Examining the American Pioneer Spirit: "The Extended Family of Laura Ingalls Wilder," published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History. So if you could all join me in welcoming Jennifer Van Haaften.  [applause]  - Good afternoon. Thank you. Forgive me, I'm recovering from a cold, so I may have pause every so often. I'm curious, how many of you have read Laura Ingalls Wilder books? Any certain part of it? Excellent. So this looks like an audience that would be familiar, so that's good to know. I'm a Wilder fan myself, obviously. And, like we said, in elementary school, probably about third, fourth grade is when I was introduced to the books. I worked at Old World Wisconsin from 2005 until 2015. And so we did use the books pretty tightly. A lot of quotes from it. We did exact activities from the books when we did our Laura Ingalls Wilder activity days that we had. So I've always been curious about Charles and Caroline, especially when we moved to Wisconsin, and I discovered that Charles and Caroline's, their own families had moved to Concord, Wisconsin, which is just up the road from where my own family lives. We live in Fort Atkinson. So in Jefferson County. So I was a little bit curious. I thought, oh, that's kind of neat. And then, you know, working at Old World, I was connected with the Wisconsin Historical Society information, and the archives had put out the fact that they had digitized some of the letters from Laura Ingalls Wilder's family, including one that had been written by her mother, Caroline. And so I was really excited because I was like cool, I can look this up, look at it online. It's still there online, so you can look that up yourself as well on Wisconsin Historical Society's website. So it was really neat that they were able to digitize that collection. It's not everything in that collection, and that particular collection resides at one of the archives regional centers at UW-Stout. And it's one whole folder. And so that was really cool. I went up there and had a chance to look at the folder full of the letters and some other information that they had. But what really kicked off my curiosity to really push forward with my research on this was the publication of the book "Pioneer Girl," which was the annotated bibliography. And that was published by the South Dakota Historical Society. Pamela Hill Smith was the one that heavily annotated it, and she had done a lot of research on the characters that are mentioned in the manuscript that was the precursor to all the books that we know today. So what I'm going to talk about, though, is the summary of my research for my article because that really focuses on Charles and Caroline and Laura growing up, her "