What Begat This Project? 

   Continued

      In the Forward of family history, I wrote: "Amateur moralist we may be; scientist we're not. A few scribbled notes at a Christmas-season dinner table led to this laborious project ... but a labor of love. 

     "Love always hopes and always endures. The reader may enjoy a Yankee soldier's recollections. Or marvel at the man who walked 58 miles to school. We found handwritten notes from the same era Katherine Lee Bates wrote America the Beautiful. We received photos that predate the U.S. income tax. 

     "There were puzzles to solve ... taking pieces of hazy memory and determining where to place them. We began to love people again for the first time. We awoke in the night, strangely enjoying their memories. Our stories begin when agrarian orientation dominated the life and structure of the USA, and end when modernization had begun to turn us inside out. 

     "The reader can judge whether we're better off with satellites and internets than we were with 8th-grade education, or less, superstitions notwithstanding. Their stories have passed through filters of the author's biases, and the reader will find lapses of literary license. 

     I ended the Forward with a tease of the first two chapters: Civil War. 

     "Now, dear reader, raise the footstool of your electric chair and load your musket. As you prepare for the fight, consider that if the trajectory of a Confederate bullet had been an inch on either side of the Yankee rifle it hit, 12 of 16 of these chapters might not have been written. Come to think of it, this author wouldn't be here either. Humbling, isn't it? 

     "On to Richmond!" 

                                    Tomorrow: Lamb conquers serpent