A 1903 letter preserved in the family archiveA letter written in 1903 can seem modest at first: a few pages, familiar handwriting, a date, and perhaps an envelope softened by age. Yet such a document may…Brighton military service through the family recordMilitary service can give a family history a clear sense of time. An enlistment date, draft card, unit reference, discharge paper, or obituary can connect one…Home exchange etiquette: lessons from our first swapOur first home exchange began with a practical decision and ended with a lesson in hospitality. We wanted to travel without reducing a new place to a hotel…The fields of Tidwell County: a family landscape in verseA field can be a place on a map, a working piece of ground, or a quiet container for memory. In family history, it often becomes all three at once. The rows,…Following the Missing Thread in John Brighton’s Family LineGenealogy Dead Ends: The Search for John Brighton’s Parents is a familiar kind of family-history problem. A researcher finds a named ancestor in a census,…The Telford Family Bible: A Record of Births and DeathsA family Bible can preserve a kind of history that formal registers often miss. Its handwritten pages may connect names, dates, marriages, children, and deaths…Allen Hackworth on the art of writing historical fictionHistorical fiction begins where documented history meets the imaginative life of ordinary people. Dates, names, places, and records establish what happened,…McCarthy family life in Chicago, 1900–1920The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of rapid change for Chicago families. Immigration, industrial employment, crowded neighborhoods,…Home Exchange in Tuscany: A Personal JournalThe first morning in Tuscany began with the quiet scrape of a shutter opening below our bedroom window. Somewhere beyond the stone walls, a rooster objected to…Sarah Ellen Telford, 1892–1965Sarah Ellen Telford’s life spanned a period of profound change in family, community, and national history. Born in 1892 and remembered as having died in 1965,…