diary author and school teacher; she was born in Milwaukee, but in 1850 her father Edwin B. Quiner (q.v.) moved the family to Watertown where he ran a newspaper; as children, she and her sisters helped set and distribute type. In 1858 the family moved to Madison, where Quiner enrolled in a teacher training program at the University of Wisconsin in the spring of 1860. She began keeping a diary when Fort Sumter was attacked in April 1861, and her accounts of a young woman's life on the home front during the first two years of the Civil War describe charitable work, raising money, shipping medical supplies to the South, and her social life.

In the summer of 1863, 23-year-old Quiner volunteered with her sister Fannie to serve two months working in a Union hospital at Memphis, Tenn. Her daily diary entries have often been quoted by scholars for their descriptions of working conditions in a Civil War hospital and her private reflections on the suffering she witnessed.

Quiner came home in Sept. 1863 intending to return to the South, but her parents' reservations made her abandon the plan at the last moment. She spent the remainder of the war helping her father write his massive Military History of Wisconsin (1866), a volume chronicling the actions of Wisconsin regiments during the Civil War. Her complete diary, 1861-1863, is online at Turning Points in Wisconsin History.

In 1866, Quiner completed her degree at the University of Wisconsin and taught briefly in Madison. About 1869 she moved to Chicago, where she taught in the public schools for a decade. About 1879 she took a position in the Denver, Colorado, schools, where she remained for 25 years. Quiner died in Oct. 1919 at the home of a sister in Chicago and was buried in Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery. She appears in public records as both ""Emily" and "Emelie."

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[Source: Federal census records; Capital Times Oct. 28, 1919]