Born Amish-Hardcover

“But what was your life like before?”

This is the question that Ruth Irene Garrett, nee Miller, has been asked again and again and again by the thousands of inspired and fascinated guests who have attended her lectures and programs on her life growing up Amish to young womanhood, when she fell in love with an Englischer and left the Amish community to begin her new life out in the world.

In Born Amish we learn about Ruth Irene Garrett’s early life as a child growing up in the Amish farming community of Kalona, Iowa: school, games and chores; work, crafts and foods; clothing, farming and tumbling about with many brothers and sisters.  We learn about the expectations for girls and boys in Amish families, of social roles and understandings about courtship and marriage, about adult baptism and a life of faith in the Amish Church.

Ruth Irene Garret, the subject of the national best-seller Crossing Over: One Woman’s Escape From Amish Life, first published in 2001, and My Amish Heritage, published in 2003, resides with her husband, photographer Ottie Garrett, Jr., in Glasgow, Kentucky and lectures frequently on Amish life to eager audiences around the country.

Deborah Morse-Kahn, M.A., is a specialist in the study of the Amish communities of the American Upper Midwest and is director of Regional Research Associates in Minneapolis, a consulting firm in the areas of regional history and historic preservation.  She has written and lectured for ten years on the special ethnic and religious communities of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.