Separate Lives

Silvia Pettem is a Colorado-based historical researcher, writer, and author of more than twenty books on history, biography, missing and unidentified persons, and true crime. She has a knack for pulling intriguing women out of the past.

Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon is set in the late nineteenth century. Pettem's other nonfiction narratives on women focus on later time periods. In Search of the Blonde Tigress: The Untold Story of Eleanor Jarman exposes and expands upon a true crime story from the 1930s, while Someone's Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe, Updated Edition follows a murder investigation (and identification of the victim) from the 1950s.

Pettem lives with her husband and two cats in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado, where she continues her research and writing. She can be reached through her website, silviapettem.com.