A Nebraska Life

Before World War I, farm work was performed by powerful draft horses imported from Europe. The Kelly family owned one of the most important draft horse importation companies in Nebraska. Their farmland would later become the heart of what is present-day Lincoln. Mary Kelly Hellweg describes her family's business and her memories growing up on the farm, the changes wrought by World War I, and the challenges living on the homefront during World War II-caring for two small children and maintaining a home while her husband, a U.S. Navy officer and dentist, served on a medical ship. "Family histories and stories are precious and unless someone in the family records them they are lost forever," Hellweg writes. Letters, her husband's World War II journals, and other documents round out this collection, which provides a unique portrait of one family's experience of the twentieth century.