Let history come alive with real people and real historical events interwoven with imaginative stories! Although based on genealogical and historical facts, Iowa Born and Bred is part history and part novel, where thoughts, feelings and life-changing events shape the lives of those in the story, as well as the lives of descendants that follow. Maria Kellar Nelson was born in 1860 on a farm in Iowa. Her father was a farmer, preacher and inventor. Maria married Peter Nelson, an immigrant from Denmark, in the Dakota Territory and moved to northwest Iowa, raising five children there. When in his early twenties, her second oldest son, Martin Lyle, headed east to Chicago where he received over one hundred patents for his inventions. Meanwhile, Maria and Peter went west to California. In 1949, Maria Nelson's great-granddaughter got on the Union Pacific in Chicago and traveled alone to California to visit the great-grandmother she had never met. This is the second in Carol Troestler's historical novels about her great-grandmothers, the first being Flow On Sweet Missouri. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband where she raised six children and owned a mental health center.
Carol Troestler was born in 1938 in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois in a three generation home. After graduation from high school, she attended Ripon College where she majored in biology and psychology. She got married to Tom Troestler in December of 1959 and then returned to Ripon to complete her requirements for graduation in January 1960 before joining her husband who was in flight training for the Marine Corps in Pensacola, Florida. After moving to Beeville Texas where they had twins, and Beaufort South Carolina where they had a third child, they moved to Illinois where her husband became employed as a pilot with American Airlines.
After having three more children, the family moved to rural Wisconsin. Carol got a Master's Degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1980 and then worked as a social worker. She wrote many nonfiction books for schools and also a program for people with life threatening illness, Renewing Life.
She wrote two historical novels based on family stories, and a book of fairy tales. She has written a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis waiting for a publisher.
