About Us

Melissa Alexander  has been blessed with the spirit of curiosity, which has led her to many passions, including cooking, baking, historical reenacting, and sewing.  She is embarking on her fourth year as a living historian, with a focus in the Federalist period, spending countless hours researching styles, mannerisms, and ways of dress in order to recreate the period as well as possible.  To find Melissa’s adventures in sewing, living history, and research, head on over to The Deviant Dressmaker. She is a college student at Xavier University studying English and Computer Science, and fuels her fabric addiction by working at a local coffee house.

Melissa has been quick to jump into cooking and baking since a very young age, but has only recently discovered the true worth of a homemade meal due to countless trips to the school cafeteria.  Since the beginning of her living history career she has been interested in the food our ancestors ate, but her interest was spiked once Betsy proposed the Historical Food Fortnightly.  She now spends her days in woeful anticipation of when and what she’ll be able to cook next.

Betsy Connolly has loved history ever since she can remember. She has been a living historian for thirteen years (which doesn’t make her as old as you think she is) and is lucky enough to have mentors and friends who showed her the importance of research, documentation and “doing it right the first time” from the very beginning (though she’s made more mistakes than any woman should be allowed). Her main focus is the mid-19th century in the upper midwest, known then as “the Old Northwest”, but she dabbles in early American history  and can be stretched into the first half of the 20th century, if she must. She blogs her adventures in history at In The Past Lane and hails from central Minnesota by way of St. Paul.

A reluctant cook, Betsy’s first experiences with historic foodways were the American Girls cookbooks in her pre-teen years. Since then, she has expanded her repertoire and knows the heartache caused by the words “make in the usual fashion”. By day she works in corporate training, which funds all her fabric-shopping binges; she plans on foisting her foodways experiments on unsuspecting colleagues at departmental potlucks.