When the geese come

While studying medicine at Hahnemann University in Pennsylvania, Joseph Herman Romig met Ella Mae Ervin, a nursing school graduate, who shared his desires to help those less fortunate. The couple married and were sent to Alaska where they joined Herman's sister, Edith, and her husband John Kilbuck at the Moravian mission in Bethel. To keep in touch with her family, Ella recorded her daily life in letters home. These transcribed epistolary journals tell the experiences of a young woman who left the East Coast to accompany her new husband to the then little-known coast of southwest Alaska at the close of the 19th century. This is the narrative of a devoted wife and mother constantly threatened by hardship, disease, and weather who nevertheless grew to love her adopted country as she loved the family to whom she wrote. Ella's attitude about life was buoyant, even though she occasionally complained about the drudgery, the loneliness, and the hard work.