Daughter of John M. Jordan (1834-1917) & Mary Elizabeth Barnett (1842-1881), Carrie had an uncommonly adventuresome life. Her father, born in Belfast, Ireland, immigrated as a child, first to Haverstraw, NY then to Red Wing MN (1856) and became a Corporal in the MN Infantry during the Civil War. Her mother, born in Indiana and raised in Olathe KS, married John Jordan there in 1871. Carrie was the second of their four children (Franklin B., Caroline E., Leabert E. and Florence). In 1881, the family made a big move, to Cedar Keys, FL, where friends from KS has moved earlier to run a hotel. They established themselves on Hog Island, across from Cedar Keys. Within a year, their mother died in a Yellow Fever epidemic. Their father worked as a blacksmith, oysterman, and house-builder but decided to return to MN in 1881, to his father's farm in Red Wing. Carrie married Valentine George Schaaf on 20 Dec. 1892. Val, a master plumber, had come to work on the state Reform School being built, partly on Carrie's grandfather's land. "It was not puppy love, either" she said in a memoir audiotaped when she was 89 years old and had long been a widow, because it lasted until Val's death in 1940. They raised twelve children together, on a farm they built near Murdock MN. They lost one (Margaret Zella) at age 19, to "sleeping sickness," another (John Bernard) at age 42 in 1946, to colon cancer, and a third (Eugene Valentine) was murdered in a robbery at age 40 in 1950. Carrie was never able to talk about these losses, except to exclaim how "dear" and "wonderful" her children were. She was unschooled, except for the year she attended first grade when she was twelve, but was extremely literate and articulate; she had been taught to read and write as a young girl by her father and grandfather. At age 89, she acceded to repeated urgings by her children and grandchildren to record her life and left us a 50-page account, a loving legacy filled with precisely recalled details of the years of her amazing life.