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March 9, 2024 - An author said she was "absolutely gobsmacked" when former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton agreed to write the foreword of her latest book. Margaret Hedley, a genealogist, has chronicled the lives of female ancestors who lived and worked in the County Durham coalfields.
She met Mrs Clinton, whose own family has roots in the area, during a visit to South Shields, at which the former presidential candidate agreed to be involved.
Mrs Clinton said she hoped Mrs Hedley's books would inspire historians to document the daily lives "not just of men... but of the women living quieter but just as important lives alongside them".
Mrs Hedley, from Wheatley Hill, County Durham, said she wrote the books because when she was trying to research the lives of women married to coal miners in the 1800s she could not find any published information.
"I realised that the only way I was going to be able to document their story was if I told it myself, using my great-great grandmother Hannah Hall as a case study," she told BBC Radio Newcastle.
Mrs Hedley carried out detailed research using census returns, parish records and family documents to put together Hannah's story, weaving in details from newspapers about people's lives at the time.
Mrs Hedley met Mrs Clinton when she came to the North East to deliver a lecture at a South Shields school in June 2022.
The former US first lady's family emigrated to Pennsylvania from the village of Oxhill, Stanley, in 1882.
"We met up to discuss her family story and what was going on here to make people want to emigrate at that time," she said.
"That was what she was interested in.
"She was absolutely lovely.
"I asked her to write the foreword never expecting for her to agree...but she did!"
In the foreword, Mrs Clinton wrote: “I grew up hearing stories from my family members who emigrated to the United States from a County Durham mining community in the 19th Century.
"That’s what drew me to Margaret Hedley’s remarkable trilogy of books.
"None of the women she details lived their lives thinking they’d be recorded in history, but their stories of resilience and survival are essential.”
Mrs Hedley, who wrote the series entitled Women of the Durham Coalfield after taking a writing course in her sixties, said the experience of documenting her family's story in later life had been full of surprises.
"This started off as a college project," she added.
"I was amazed the publishers were interested so quickly and then that there was demand for another two books... and now this.
"Someone so important writing the foreword for a book about Wheatley Hill!"
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