Join Kim Bancroft at the Oakmont Sunday Symposium this March as she discusses how to capture a family’s legacy.
Bancroft is the author of Writing Themselves Into History, which tells the story of Emily Brist Ketchum Bancroft (1834–1869) and Matilda Coley Griffing Bancroft (1848–1910). The first and second wives of historian extraordinaire Hubert Howe Bancroft, these two women were deeply engaged members of society and perceptive chroniclers of their times, and they left behind extensive records of their lives and work. Writing Themselves into History offers a rich immersion in nineteenth-century California, detailing Emily’s and Matilda’s experiences with public life, motherhood, and business against the backdrop of San Francisco’s high society and the state’s growth amidst the tumult of the American Civil War.
Register HereLongtime teacher turned editor and writer, Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014 Kim edited H.H.B.'s 1890 autobiography, Literary Industries, published by Heyday Books. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, called The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Of many other memoirs that Kim has recently helped create, she has edited two of Native friends in the Willits area where she now lives in a cabin in the woods. Kim is also seeking to publish a book she wrote with a former classmate, David Waddell, called Same School, Different Class: A Dual Memoir of School Integration.