Within days of Mother's passing people began to urge me to write her biography. To each I gave the same answer. I could write about her as my mother, but by the time I was grown and her work expanded to more than local teaching, I was away at school, then in Latin America, and later in Portugal as a pioneer. We were usually in different countries and even on different continents. There were others, I felt, who were more directly involved and knew far more about her later life and work.

For twenty-two years I did little more than tell occasional stories about her. On January 26, 1976, our daughter Dorothy again asked me to write about Mother's life. She didn't want to know her grandmother simply as a two-dimensional, paper cut-out angel. For some reason the penny finally dropped. When she left the house, I sat down and wrote to the secretary of the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Lima, Ohio, to ask the friends there to gather information and stories they remembered about Mother. Sealing the envelope I thought, "Well, I might as well write to a few other people, too," and I started a list. In the next few days the project snowballed, and I settled down to the task of gathering as much information as I could still locate, some twenty-two years after Mother's passing.