Family Stories...and How I Found Mine

Family Stories...and How I Found Mine by Cleverley, J Michael. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780806359090.

Family Stories ...and How I Found Mine is actually several books rolled into one. At its simplest, it conveys the history of author J. Michael Cleverleys family from the early Middle Ages, through its establishment in colonial New England, and later in the American Midwest and Mountain West. Unlike many genealogies, however, it examines these stories in the context of American and European history. The author, a retired senior diplomat in the U.S. foreign service and a published author, is keenly aware of the impact individuals and families have on their times, and vice versa. By being with the Cleverley ancestors as they negotiate the challenges of prior centuries, readers of Family Stories ...and How I found Mine will find insight into the lives and challenges of their own ancestors. But the book has still another level. Interspersed throughout the chapters is a treatise on how to produce a family history, showing by example how family stories can be discovered, often more easily than thought, and what researchers may be able to find in todays rich cyber world of family history. Family Stories ...and How I Found Mine spreads out over a millennium. The story begins with Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, before jumping to the Greene family serving in the court of Plantagenet kings from 1300 to 1500. Next comes a chapter devoted to Puritan New England ancestors of the 1600s, their subsequent exile as non-conformists to Rhode Island, and their fight for religious and gender rights. Another chapter recounts their service at the Battle of Concord in 1775. From the 1830s to 1860s, we follow the family to Missouri and Kansas, where they serve in the Civil War. Others survive western Indian Wars, and some trudge the trails to Utah and Idaho. The story concludes with a stirring account of Seija Cleverley (the authors wife) and her familys hardships during Finlands struggles with Soviet Russia in the Second World War. Each chapter, including the methodological commentary, is self-contained. The reader can pick up the book at any point for a complete experience of a specific era and family members under discussion or can read the volume straight through in its entirety. Either way, this is a volume that entertains as it enlightens, and teaches as it chronicles a family history.