You don't know what you don't know, until you know it.

I’m currently researching and writing a Civil War story involving the Beaman, Cranford, Hulin, Hurley, and Moore families of Montgomery County, North Carolina. At the onset of the war many of them were members of the Wesleyan Methodist Church They were hard working farmers who owned no slaves; their loyalties and beliefs were strongly tested by the war. In the Piedmont area of North Carolina violence became commonplace as a result of these beliefs, and led to persecution and murder. The story of outliers and Home Guard, conscription and desertion, culminating in the murder of three Hulin brothers is the story I am researching.

Ordinary Ancestors

 In The Journey Takers, the author, Leslie Albrecht Huber, writes that her Swedish family was ordinary. They led unremarkable lives that left no records. But she knows how they lived because they were ordinary. She knows the history of the times, the lifestyles of the people who lived where they lived. She wonders if she is ordinary, or if she will leave a mark on the world. Don’t we all leave our mark on the world, in one way or another? Her ancestors did, even though they left no trail of documents for her to find. Because of them, she lives to author a book about their lives and thousands of us come to know her family and their ordinary lives through her.