Finding Minnie R. Mickel

Rescued from a 21st-century garage sale by Richard Harms, this photo was identified as his wife Joan’s great-grandmother. Family had so thoroughly forgotten this divorced and remarried woman that they guessed at her name as “Grace Kelly Freehouse.” The search for her personal history and actual name–Minnie R. Mickel–illustrates how easily women have been lost to the past and how difficult it can be to find them again. When Minnie posed for her photo as a suffragist, probably between 1912 and 1914, little did she know how long a life it would have in the world–or that it would become an iconic image of the suffrage effort in Grand Rapids, Michigan!