Family history, poetry, and home exchange notes Contact: RoadRunner_Books@allenhackworth.com
Hackworth Family
Poetry Genealogy Tidwell Line South Family Exchange
Home/Family Website

Insights

The Glow of the Oil Lamp in the Telford Parlor
An oil lamp gives a room more than light. Its small flame gathers faces, furniture, and family stories into one warm circle, turning an ordinary evening into…
The Brighton Family’s 1910 Census: A Snapshot of a Household
A census entry can make a family history feel briefly inhabited. Names, ages, occupations and places of birth turn a line in a pedigree into a household with…
Great-Aunt Mary McCarthy's doily and the long threads of family memory
The doily arrived in a square of pale tissue paper, inside a cardboard shoebox that smelled of cedar and old wool. My cousin sent it from her mother's flat in…
Uncle Thomas Brighton's pocket knife and the words around it
I have kept a small essay about Uncle Thomas Brighton's pocket knife in my files for years, moving it from folder to folder as I reorganised the family papers.…
A family on the move: the McCarthy relocation from Pennsylvania to Ohio
Wagon ruts still show in the soil of eastern Ohio, and the surnames carved into nineteenth-century headstones there tell a familiar story. The McCarthys of…
A South family livestock ledger from 1870
Tucked away in the Hackworth family archive sits a leather-bound account book kept by an ancestor of the South family. Its pages, faded to the colour of weak…
Loni’s How-To: Interviewing Elderly Relatives for Oral Histories
An oral history preserves more than names and dates. It captures the pause before an answer, the nickname nobody wrote down, the sound of a kitchen during…
Finding Tidwell Biographies in County Histories
County histories can turn a name in a family tree into a recognisable person. A brief entry may identify a Tidwell ancestor’s occupation, marriage, land,…
William Brighton, 1815–1899: A Life Preserved in Family Memory
William Brighton lived from 1815 until 1899, a span of eighty-four years that covered enormous changes in Britain and the wider English-speaking world. His…
Home Exchange In Portugal: Life In A Whitewashed Algarve House
A home exchange in Portugal can feel less like a holiday rental and more like borrowing a chapter from another family’s life. In the Algarve, that chapter may…