Lives and Letters

These pages distill some forty years of personal research on eight family lines. These family lines originated in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the West Indies. Arriving in America between 1630 and 1848, the families originally settled in New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and points west.
This narrative is enlivened and made more compelling by the inclusion of twenty-two personal letters and communications spanning nearly four hundred years.

The letters include communications sent from:
Groton Hall, England about 1603
Colonial Massachusetts in 1649
Germany in 1791
Guadeloupe, West Indies in 1798 and 1830
rural Missouri in 1848-49
New Orleans in 1863-64
a Civil War camp during the siege of Atlanta
Alaska during the 1898 gold rush
China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900
Berlin in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.