Tarbell, Ida Minerva (1875-1944). American “muckraking” journalist and biographer. Ida Tarbell was born on a farm in Erie County, PA. When her father entered the oil business the family moved to the rough Pennsylvania oil region city of Rouseville for several years before settling in Titusville. Tarbell graduated from Alleghany College in 1880 and briefly taught in Ohio before earning an MA from Alleghany and going to work for the Chautaquan magazine. After three years editing and writing for the magazine, she spent three years in Paris, France, studying history at the Sorbonne. On her 1893 return to the U.S., she was hired by McClure’s to write a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, then moving on to Abraham Lincoln as a subject, about whom she would write periodically for decades. She is best known for her next work for McClure’s, The History of the Standard Oil Company (serialized 1902-1904). Conflicts with S. S. McClure led her to depart McClure’s in 1906 with fellow writers Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker to found the competing American Magazine, where she worked until 1915. Thereafter, she made her living as a free-lance writer. When Cather arrived at McClure’s in spring 1906, Tarbell was still working there. Despite Tarbell’s imminent planned departure, the two women became friendly enough that Tarbell invited Cather to visit the farm she had recently bought in Connecticut and where her mother and sister lived with her. It is not clear how frequently Cather and Tarbell saw each other in subsequent years but they kept in touch, and Cather contributed to Tarbell’s efforts to support S. S. McClure financially. Tarbell died in Bridgeport, CT, and is buried in Titusville.

Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in the Virginia to William Lee Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud, NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928 Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.