(The Associated Press circulated the following story on August 7.)
HOLDREGE, Neb. — In 1859, at the age of 18, Mary Jane Wyatt was an unwed mother working as a housemaid in Ohio. By the time she died in the 1910s, she was a successful traveling photographer based in Holdrege, where her husband had been sheriff.
Beverly Adam, a writer from Campbell, Calif., was researching her family when she came across Wyatt, her great-great-grandfather’s sister.
After finding a photo of Wyatt’s husband in a family album, Adam noted that the photographer’s name was “Mrs. MJ Wyatt.” Adam was especially excited because she has a background in photojournalism.
Wyatt’s father was married three times and had nine children. Her mother died when Wyatt was a young girl in Ohio.
For nearly 30 years, Wyatt operated a photography studio that she started in Illinois. After several years, she outfitted her own railroad car with a traveling studio to take portraits of people along the route of the Burlington Missouri River Railroad.
Adam eventually wrote a book based on Wyatt’s life. “She Rode the Rails” is what Adam calls her fictional biography.
She started the book as a strict biography but changed her approach.
“I tried to stick to the facts, which can be limiting,” she said.
She also wanted to get the story of Wyatt’s husband. Andrew A. Wyatt was a Civil War veteran, an engineer for the Burlington Missouri River and sheriff of Phelps and Kearney Counties.
The Wyatts were married in 1871, when Mary Jane was 30.
“He must have been a neat man,” Adam said, because Andrew had to have set up Mary Jane in the photography business at a time when wives were supposed to stay home.
Mary Jane began working regularly in 1878 in her studio in Roseland, Ill.
She began traveling with her husband on the railroad, taking photos along the way.
When Andrew Wyatt moved to Phelps County to work on the railroad, his wife opened a studio on East Avenue in Holdrege.
Adam said she doesn’t know how or when Mary Jane Wyatt died. The last record she found of her was from 1917, and Adam figured she died sometime between 1917 and 1920.
“History is my passion,” she said, “but I would have never imagined I was going to find someone as interesting as Mary Jane in my family tree.”