If you’ve read Before We Were Yours, the fictional account of a family torn apart by Georgia Tann and her Tennessee Children’s Home Society, you might be interested in learning what happened to some of those children who passed through Tann’s hands. Lisa Wingate, the author of Before We Were Yours, collaborated with journalist, Judy Christie, to bring us Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. We’re reading Before and After for our summer Family Locket Book Club selection on Goodreads. If you share a love of reading and a love of writing your...
Do you have a forgotten story in your family history? One that might seem unbelievable until some fact checking proves it to be true? We all have ancestors whose story might be begging to be told. Could a family story been silenced due to shame, misunderstanding, negligence? If so we have a challenging task ahead of us to uncover more information and provide the perspective that comes with time. In Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt, we have an example of uncovering the story of an incredible feat that was initially silenced by...
Have you taken a DNA test for the fun of discovering your ethnicity estimate only to be blindsided with an unexpected relationship? If so you are not alone. With more people taking consumer DNA tests, family secrets from long ago and not so long ago are being revealed. How does one deal with a new half sibling or biological parent? These questions and more are addressed in Libby Copeland’s new book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are. We’re reading this intriguing book for our spring book club selection. If you’d like to weigh in on the...
Do you love a good story? Ever wondered what it was like for your ancestors as they homesteaded in the western United States? Reading the original letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, you get both – the stories from the viewpoint of a homesteader. The Atlantic Monthly first published Elinore’s letters in 1914, then Houghton Mifflin published them as the book titled Letters of a Woman Homesteader. The complete book has been digitized and is available on Internet Archive. Find A Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com : accessed 30 January 2020), memorial page for Elinore Pruitt Stewart (3 Jun 1876–8 Oct 1933), Find...
Do you ever feel like you’re the only genealogist in your circle of family and friends? If so, a dose of Buzzy Jackson and her book, Shaking the Family Tree: Blue Bloods, Black Sheep, and Other Obsessions of an Accidental Genealogist might be what you need. Reading about her adventures in the genealogy world will have you chuckling and commiserating at the same time. This post contains affiliate links. If you click the link and make a purchase, we receive a commission. Thank you for your support! Shaking the Family Tree is our fall selection for the Family Locket Book Club on...
As family historians we recognize the need to gather our family stories, but what happens when we uncover stories that were never discussed? What if we found our family was part of one of the most dramatic and disturbing eras of the 20th century – the Holocaust of World War II? In Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones we learn the remarkable story of her family’s survival as Polish Jews. Georgia made the discovery of her family’s past when she was 14 years old. Like many of us, she was fulfilling a school assignment to research more about her family...
With DNA testing turning up skeletons in the closet left and right, I was interested to read Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. This fictional account of a family describes the horrific Tennessee Children’s Home Society operated by Georgia Tann in Memphis, Tennessee, from the 1920s to 1950. (The above is an affiliate link). Wingate created her story based on recollections of children who were kidnapped from their families and put into Tann’s “orphanage.” It is estimated that Tann stole over 5,000 children. Many of them were adopted out to wealthy families, mostly in New York or California. The adoptive...
Can you imagine losing your way as a five-year-old child? Not being able to find your way home? Living on the streets for a few months and then being adopted by a family who spoke a different language and looked different from you? Would you look for the home you remembered? The mother and siblings lost to you? How would you find them in a country of a billion people? Is you interest piqued yet? I hope so, because all of the above happened to Saroo Brierley, author of A Long Way Home: A Memoir. Saroo’s incredible journey was made...
Do you need to escape into the pages of a good old-fashioned mystery with a genealogical twist? Then let me introduce you to author, Nathan Dylan Goodwin, and the fictional Morton Farrier, forensic genealogist. Hiding the Past: A Genealogical Crime Mystery I’d been hearing about Nathan’s books for some time, but missed meeting him at RootsTech 2018 when he made the journey across the pond to hob nob with fellow genealogists. I decided the first book in his series, Hiding the Past : A Genealogical Crime Mystery, would be perfect for our fall book club selection. There is something about settling...
When is the last time your immersed yourself in the history of a research locality? You might know the records well and have a basic understanding of the history and geography, but reading a full length book is an excellent way to bolster your genealogy knowledge. As a southern United States researcher I often come across land records that state something like “land obtained by the Creek Session of 1832.” I had a vague understanding of the five civilized tribes removal from the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama in the 1830s but hadn’t connected that to...
