Alice Gilchrist Reagan's Autograph Book

Introduction and Maps

Click on picture to see it in larger size

Size: 7" X 4-1/4" X 15/16th" (probably originally 1") at thickest part. Twenty seven pages remain; five have been cut out. The cover is velvet-like, still very soft. This is as it appeared in December, 2008. The original owner was Alice (Gilchrist) Reagan/Regan (1868-1934).


If you've already read the history of this book
(below) Click Here for Links to All Pages.

Mary Alice (or Alice Mary) Gilchrist was born on March 13, 1868 in La Salle, Illinois. Between 1870 and 1873, when Alice was approximately between two and five years old, with at least four older siblings, Alice moved with her family to Leland, in Winnebago County, Iowa.

It happens that her future husband's family had also lived in La Salle County, Illinois; they moved to Mitchell County, Iowa between 1862 and 1865. While Mitchell County and Winnebago County are not next to each other, they are both in north central Iowa and border on Minnesota (just above the red-dots-and-dashes border at the top of the map is Minnesota). You can see from the following maps (one of the entire state of Iowa and the other a close-up the cluster of counties that contain both Mitchell and Winnebago counties) that they are really very close together.

There are ninety-nine counties in Iowa, so you know that none of them are large. And so it is only natural that the family would spread out a little. Besides, Charles Reagan, Alice Gilchrist's future husband, was a schoolteacher (and may have been Alice's teacher), so he may have been assigned to a school in Winnebago County. At any rate they both found themselves in the same place (Leland, Iowa) at the same time and were married.

Now we can get to Alice's autograph book. She was the first to write in it, on July 19th, 1886. Remember that she was born on March 13, 1868 and so she was eighteen years old and probably just out of high school when she started collecting signatures in her book. She was married the next year, on April 18, 1887 to Charles Henry Reagan. She kept the book until her death, and in it recorded the names, and dates and places of birth of her children, among other things. Although some of the pages were never written on, and some were cut out, there is a lot of great interest in this book to her descendants.

...OUR IOWA FAMILY
...Preface
...Introduction
...Table of Contents
...Links to All Maps
...Questions & Answers

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