"I hark back across the long stretch of seventy-eight years to a little log house set among the hills, a river flowing near, dividing it from a field and meadow, a little brook dividing house from garden, around the garden a stone fence. Over this little, humble picture, a wild December snowstorm raged, the 22nd of that month, 1829, and the kind hands of a good aunt, who had been summoned from five miles away, gently cared for the little, wee girl, who opened her eyes on that bleak night, in that humble home, far in the corner of Northwest Illinois, then a wilderness almost of wolves and Indians." - Clarissa Emely Gear Hobbs, Autobiography of Clarissa Emely Gear Hobbs.

Clarissa Emely Gear Hobbs was born to Ezekiah Gear, an early Galena settler, miner, and politician who helped found and build the Grace Episcopal Church.  But Clarissa did not just live in the shadow of her larger than life father, she cared for the sick and wounded on the front lines of the Civil War, wrote many books about frontier life, was an active suffragette, and lived to the age of 93, long enough to see the passage of the nineteenth amendment and cast her first vote in 1920 at the age of 91.

But Clarissa tells her story better than I could hope to, and I encourage you to read her autobiography at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40189809.pdf.