Imagine being given the key to a locked room that contains answers and insights into your family going back two hundred years. But it’s not an actual key, but thousands of documents, some on fragile paper with barely legible ink, some carefully archived and preserved by devoted descendants. a handwritten book of poems from 1832 that belonged to a great-great-great-grandmotherThere is a Civil War Diary of a great-great-grandfather; ; hundreds of newspaper articles by a great-grandmother who wrote regularly for 76 years; a story submitted by my grandmother to the Atlantic in 1952 about a young girl’s disturbing encounter with an older man. Stories and essay by myuncle and mother that reference or reflect back on the family texts thatThese documents, and many more, plus many photos have been miraculously preserved and handed down to me. My goal is to share with you the life stories of my ancestors and relatives who left these textual traces of themselves, share a curated selection of their actual writing, and provide some historical and literary background and analysis.

Each is transcribed with care and respect for the medium that first carried it: either handwritten in script or the typewritten page or published newspaper articles.