Just like her parents and three of her grandparents, Abby Crane was born in Berkley, Massachusetts.  When she was almost five, her mother died.  Abby’s father remarried three years later and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the birthplace of his second wife.  Abby and her sister Caroline apparently remained in the Berkley family home with their aunt, Sophia Crane.  

As teenagers in the early 1840s, Abby and Caroline studied at Wheaton Female Seminary, which later became Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts.  Abby went on to teach school for a few years before deciding she liked trading better than teaching.

Abby was very close to her younger sister Caroline who married Abiathar Crane and moved with him to Indiana in 1849. In 1852, Abby visited her sister in Indiana.  It was probably on this trip that she met Abiathar’s cousin, Benjamin Bennett Briggs.  Abby and Benjamin married in Putnam, Indiana, before returning to Benjamin’s home in Sharon, Ohio, where their daughter Irene Crane Briggs was born the next year.

In 1861 Abby and Irene visited family back in Massachusetts.  She and Benjamin were planning a trip--and possibly a relocation--to California.  Abby was happy being home and wondered if Massachusetts might be a better  destination than California. Nevertheless, the family sailed out of New York, crossed Panama on the new railroad and then sailed to San Francisco, finally reaching Benjamin’s sister’s home in Marysville, California.  Benjamin bought property near Saticoy in what is now Ventura County, California.  Sadly, Abby died soon thereafter in the Saticoy adobe house. “Agreeably to her request, she was buried quietly, without parade or ceremony, under an evergreen oak tree upon the hillside, about 1/4 mile from the house,”  Benjamin Briggs wrote to Caroline Crane on July 20, 1862.

Abby’s letters to her sister reveal that, in spite of her reservations, she was smitten with California.  She described her journey with a sense of wonder, and even the devastating floods of 1861-1862 didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for her new home.  As her descendants, we are most fortunate that many of Abby’s letters have survived.