This farming life

My next door neighbours are a young couple who raise ducks and geese, chicken and children. They work all hours and even the arrival of a new sprog is no reason to let up. This latest addition - the 4th or 5th (I've lost count) - is sharing the daily round with her mother at 3 weeks old. Her siblings already take it in their stride.

At my first glimpse of the baby, a tiny little thing, her face looked like a tightly closed rosebud. She'll likely grow and bloom into another country girl who carries on the farming tradition in this rural neck of the woods. Or will she...?

A local history-inclined friend just sent me a snippet from Welsh Newspapers Online. The Carmarthen Weekly Reporter of January 17th 1896 carries a brief announcement that
Miss Frances A Barry, of this address, has received a medal and a diploma of qualification from the medical faculty of the San Francisco City and County Training Hospital for Nurses, where she has for the last three years been acquiring the necessary experience.
How extraordinary! How did a young woman from the Pembrokeshire countryside get to train as a nurse in California - and what became of her? I'd love to know more about Frances but her past is as obscure to me as this little one's future.

Update
Frances A. Barry was actually Parry and is recorded, when graduating from the college in December 1895, as coming from 'South Wales, England' (!)