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Susan Taylor Brand is a pen name, and Susan Taylor Brand.com is blog and wellness website.
The Name Susan Taylor Brand
Susan Taylor, nee Brand, was the name of my great great great grandmother. Her life was short, but probably happy, and although there were some defeats, one could argue she was triumphant in the end, because … well because she has many, many descendants.
Susan was born in New York, sometime around 1842, and moved to Wisconsin at the age of eight with her large family. She was one of 14 children, although several did not survive infancy.
She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. She met Phineas, who was the source of the the Taylor name, when she was 13 and he was 17. Both lived in Fond du Lac, where he farmed with his brother and taught school. In 1855, Phineas moved on to Minnesota to homestead newly opened land in Fairibault County. He and Susan kept in touch by letter, and planned to be married. However, before that happened, the Civil War broke out. Phineas and his family were staunch abolitionists, and it was clear that he would be joining the Union army. Phineas served through the entire war, was wounded twice, and marched through Georgia with General Sherman’s men. He came home after the war and he and Susan were married.
They newlyweds lived on Phineas’ homestead in Fairibault County and four children were born to them in six years. But with the birth of the fourth, something went wrong. Susan died in childbirth and her baby, a daughter, died at the age of two months. As is so common with stories this old, no details are known. Infections often struck women postpartum, hemorages, fatigue, these details are lost. Even those who were there may not have been able to explain. This story struck me terribly when I first heard it as a child. Later I relived it, hearing the stories of deaths in childbirth in American literature in college. And of course I remembered the story when I had my own children.
Susan’s oldest child, Lena, survived this tragedy and she was my great great grandmother. Lena was tough, pretty, and the story was passed down that she suffered under the hand of her stepmother Viola. But Lena persevered. I like to imagine that she carried on hopes and dreams she had learned from her mother before she died. Lena was the schoolteacher in her little country school when she was only a teenager, and she married a somewhat unexpected suitor, a German immigrant who had been working as a farm hand locally and who came to her school to learn English. He was two years older than her and they were married when she was 19. When her oldest child was born, she gave her son “Brand” for a middle name. Thus the heritage of her mother, Susan, and of her mother’s family, the Brands, was preserved. The name was passed down, to my father, and finally to my son.
I do not know how many descendants Susan Taylor Brand might have — Lena was the mother of nine, and I have no information about the lives or descendants of Susan’s other two children. I named this blog after her because I wanted to remember her, my forgotten (almost) pioneer foremother, who had lived in obscurity, died quite young (she was 31) yet changed the world for so many simply by giving the world children, who carried on after she was gone.
This is where the name Susan Taylor Brand came from, a pen name for me, and yet it’s also not me, a name, perhaps, for many, we Midwesterners, descendants of the cold winter prairie country, for whom survival is success but death is not a failure as it is inevitable — the failure would be is misusing your days.
I try not to do that, misuse my days. And the blog helps me, thinking about being mindful, creative, learning new things, taking care of myself and others. Hopefully the blog is helping you to do the same, Reader, as writing it has helped me.
2026