A noted genealogist reveals what it is like to be a history detective using twenty-first-century techniques and technology, and discusses some of the cases she has solved, including the families of celebrities and work for the Army and the FBI.

"The Adobe Kingdom" is one of those rare things: the true story of two families across twelve generations. They came to New Mexico seeking a new homeland, not to initiate a new society but to transplant an old one. What they found, as they lived their lives in what they came to believe was one of the most beautiful places on earth, was a forbidding land, both hostile and nurturing, and not unlike the land they had left behind. Their daily contact...

Telling the stories of those who quietly conducted the business and built the livelihoods that made their societies prosper or fail this account shows how one Scots-Irish American family, the Hammills, millers, wagon makers, and blacksmiths, lived out their lives against the backdrop of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and westward expansion. Spanning three centuries from the shores of Ireland to the Chesapeake Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest,...

This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, Andre; Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German...

"The intriguing characters in these real family history mysteries include an agricultural laborer who left secrets behind in Somerset when he migrated to Manchester, a working-class woman who bafflingly lost ten of her fourteen children in infancy, a miner who purportedly went to live with the Red Indians and a merchant prince of the Empire who was rumored to have two wives. his book shows how a variety of sources including birth, marriage and death...