Buried Voices: A Mystery That Refuses to Stay Silent

There’s something unsettling about a name half-remembered. A woman whose life existed in the margins of history, reduced to a brief mention in a museum exhibit or a fading inscription on a gravestone.

That’s how it started.

When I first saw the brooch—the delicate, gold-framed artifact resting inside a glass display at Snow College—I should have simply moved on, cataloging it along with the other pioneer artifacts. But something about it felt personal. The placard beneath it named its former owner: Mary Ann Sorensen, early Ephraim settler. Details of her life remain unclear.

Unclear.

That word wouldn’t let me go. I’ve spent my career piecing together history, filling in the gaps where memory and record-keeping have failed. And I’ve learned that when a story is “unclear,” it’s usually because someone wanted it that way.

Then, the brooch disappeared.

A Mystery Rooted in the Past

The theft of the artifact wasn’t just a crime; it was a message. And I had to know why.

Who would steal a piece of pioneer jewelry? What was so important about this brooch that someone would risk breaking into a museum to take it? As I started digging, I discovered that Mary Ann Sorensen wasn’t just another pioneer wife. She was a leader. A woman who defied expectations. A woman whose contributions had been systematically erased from our town’s history.

And the deeper I looked, the more I realized—I wasn’t just searching for a stolen artifact. I was uncovering a hidden legacy.

With Sheriff Mark Jensen (equal parts investigator and reluctant partner in crime-solving), I traced Mary Ann’s past through journals, letters, and whispered family secrets. What I found shocked me.

She wasn’t just an early settler. She had created a quiet, underground network for women in need—women who were trapped in circumstances they couldn’t escape alone. She had provided them shelter, resources, and a chance at a future beyond what was expected of them. And she had done it all in secrecy, because if the wrong people had found out?

They would have stopped her.

They almost did.

The Voices They Tried to Silence

The more I uncovered, the more resistance I faced.

I was warned—again and again—to “let it go.” I received anonymous notes telling me to stop asking questions. A shadowy figure lurked outside my home. Someone didn’t want me to bring Mary Ann’s truth to light.

And they weren’t just trying to intimidate me.

They were trying to erase her all over again.

The Church records were incomplete. The official town histories barely mentioned her. And yet, as I traced the clues hidden in Mary Ann’s own words—notes scribbled in hymnals, coded messages passed between women in plain sight—I realized that her story had survived, even if the world had tried to forget it.

And now, I was determined to bring it back.

A Reckoning with Faith and History

I never expected this investigation to shake me the way it did.

I’ve always been a woman of faith. My testimony has shaped the way I see the world, the way I approach justice and truth. But standing in the middle of this mystery—facing the reality that history had been rewritten to serve certain narratives while erasing others—I had to ask myself some difficult questions.

Why do we preserve some stories and let others fade?
Who gets to decide what’s remembered?
And how does our faith evolve when faced with inconvenient truths?

I wasn’t the only one grappling with those questions. Sheriff Mark Jensen, who prides himself on seeing things in black and white, struggled with the gray areas we uncovered. Hannah Sorensen, a descendant of Mary Ann, fought to reconcile the reality of her ancestor’s life with the version passed down in her family. Even Bishop Isaac McBride, the man who had most firmly opposed my investigation, was forced to confront the fact that faith and history don’t always align neatly.

And when we finally found the missing artifact—when we learned why it had been stolen, and by whom—I understood just how much the past still had power over the present.

A Story That Won’t Stay Buried

I won’t spoil the ending. I’ll just say this:

Buried Voices: Lost Women of Ephraim isn’t just about solving a theft. It’s about uncovering a history that was deliberately hidden. It’s about justice, faith, and the cost of bringing the truth to light when others would rather leave it in the dark.

It’s about the women who came before us—the ones who fought battles we were never told about, who built the foundations of our communities without ever getting credit.

It’s about whose voices we choose to remember.

And now, I’m inviting you to remember them with me.

📖 Buried Voices: Lost Women of Ephraim is available now. If you’ve followed my past investigations (The Secret of Eliza’s Journal and The Pioneer’s Legacy), you know that history has a way of refusing to stay quiet.

If this is your first time stepping into the mysteries of Ephraim—welcome. Just know that once you start digging, you may never look at history the same way again.

Are you ready to uncover what was lost?