Book Review: An Uncommon Woman

The area in purple was claimed by Virginia until 1780. At that time, much of the northern section was ceded to Pennsylvania, while the remainder is now part of West Virginia.

In 1755, Major General Edward Braddock’s was defeated near Fort Duquesne (located at Point State Park, Pittsburgh), which was part of the Virginia wilderness at the time. Afterward, all British forces retreated north and east into the colony of Pennsylvania, leaving the Virginia wilderness unprotected.

In 1756, Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie appointed George Washington as head of the Virginia militia and asked that he assess the Crown’s military clout in the Virginia wilderness. Washington determined that forts located 20 miles from each other offered little to no protection to most wilderness settlers, who would be captured or killed before they would make it to a fort.

It wasn’t until the spring of 1774, just prior to Dunmore’s War (also known as the Point Pleasant Campaign), that the actual military defense of Virginia’s western frontier began en masse. Although many more forts were constructed in the Virginian frontier during this time, there were still too few for adequate protection.

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Book Review: The Words I Never Wrote

Writing about other people’s lives, putting to pen other people’s passions and pains, is simple compared to sharing your soul and exposing your secrets on the page.

Trust me when I say, I would much rather tell you about the liars and the cheats and the shysters and the scoundrels in our families’ trees than share excerpts of my everyday existence. I guess that is why I identified with the novel, The Words I Never Wrote, by Jane Thynne.

Book Review: Finding Lady Enderly

If you had the opportunity to improve your life and all you had to do was pretend to be someone else, would you do it? The book, Finding Lady Enderly, written by Joanna Davidson Politano, asks this question of both the heroine and readers.

Book Review: One for the Blackbird…

As a family historian, I love learning about ancestral lives. Delving deep into the decades, I experience (albeit vicariously) my predecessors’ ups, downs, and moments between. I then take their stories and share them with others, hoping that with each word I write, a part of them lives again (at least in our hearts).

Book Review: Toil and Trouble

Five years ago on this blog, I posed these questions:

Did any of my ancestors ever experience any type of precognition?

Can intuition be part of a person’s genome?

Obviously, hair and eye color are genetic, although they occasionally skip a generation or two. Unfortunately, male-pattern baldness and myopia also are hereditary, as are food allergies and Roman toes. Heck, even quirky personality traits or an abysmal fashion sense can run in family lines.

But what if what you have inherited is something outside of the norm? “Are we,” as I pondered so long ago, “chromosomally connected in more ways than can be currently documented by DNA?”