Chasing History: Exploring My Ancestral Roots

Follow along as I explore my family history, travel to important historical sites, share photos, and conduct research for my various writing projects. These blog posts tells stories from various branches of my family tree, including Colonial Americans, Indian Captives, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Quakers, Pioneers on the Oregon and Mormon Trails, Civil War Veterans, Early Californians, and Ellis Island Immigrants, as well as my more immediate family.

They also tell the story of my various writing projects, including A State Divided: The Civil War Letters of James Calaway Hale and Benjamin Petree of Andrew County, MO (available on Amazon), as well as a historical fiction novel working on titled Missouri Daughter. Both are based on Civil War letters written by my family members who fought for the Union in Missouri and beyond. Other book ideas that are currently “percolating” are a historical fiction novel based on a different branch of my family tree, whose members fought for the Confederacy in Missouri, and a compilation of the “Historic Honeymoon” posts I published about my great-grandparents’ four-week honeymoon in 1905.

I actually began this blog April 30, 2022, but I am working on migrating my blog to this website, so this is now a work in progress. I hope you’ll follow along!