Although the seven of us have dispersed across the country in our adult lives, we still get together occasionally for family reunions. When we do, the conversation often turns to stories beginning with, Do you remember when. One day we decided that some of these stories should be written down, especially since some of the most cherished stories dealt with our grandparents. We were afraid that these older stories would become lost in the mists of time, and we were aware that our more recent stories would someday be old stories to our children and grandchildren. Thus was born the idea of this book. We have all contributed remembrances to this little volume and we hope that our children will be able to know more about where their parents came from. Compiling this book has been one more enjoyable and unifying activity for a family that continues to cherish each other.

A Family Saga: Life and Love Amidst Turmoil and Tragedy takes an in-depth look at the exceptional history of the Jews of Lithuania during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The community was unique, as it excelled in rational religiosity, devotion to science, and a high intellectual level and discipline. The historical novel follows the lives of five generations of a family, and their experiences in Lithuania, including many important historical events of the time. Members of the family also stayed temporarily in Berlin, visited Palestine, finally emigrated to America, and visited Lithuania after the Holocaust.

This book is a record of one man's life across almost a century from the end of World War I until the end of the 20th Century. But it is also the story of a good marriage resulting in a fine family. The story runs from an Iowa of the agricultural age and culture on which America's Middle West was established to the global economy of today's major conglomerate businesses with its jet planes and satellite communications with a brief time out for the shock of World War II. Many of my generation will identify with the experiences and changes of which this history is made.

The institutional history of Ginling College is arguably a family history. Ginling, a Christian, women's college in Nanjing founded by Western missionaries, saw itself as a family. The school's leaders built on the Confucian ideal to envision a feminized, Christian family—one that would spread Christianity and uplift the family that was the Chinese nation. Exploring the various incarnations of the trope of the "Ginling family," Jin Feng takes a microscopic view by emphasizing personal, subjective perspectives from the written and oral records of the Chinese and American women who created and sustained the school. Even when using more seemingly ordinary official documents, Feng seeks to shed light on the motives and dynamic interactions that created them and the impact they had on individual lives. Using this perspective, Feng questions the standard characterization of missionary higher education as simply Western cultural imperialism to show a process of influence and cultural exchange.

It is May 1634 when Jonathan and Elizabeth Pratt arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England. They are as yet unaware of the beauty and dangers that they will encounter in this wilderness as they embark on their journey of faith. As they establish a home and family in this new world, they and their companions will experience loss, tragedy, and death. They will also experience joy, love, and renewal as they serve one another in compassion, love, and charity-the pure love of Jesus Christ. They will learn that family can include much more than blood relations as they band together with others in their community of saints to face the challenges life in the wilderness. They learn that when they are in the service of their fellow man and women, they are in the service of God. They also learn that as they do their best to keep the commandments and live the Gospel, they prosper in this land that is choice above all other lands. In doing so, they plant the seeds of what will become this great country of the United States of America.

Winner of the New England Historical Association’s James P. Hanlan Book Award Winner the Association for the Study of Connecticut History’s Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award “Incomparably vivid . . . as enthralling a portrait of family life [in colonial New England] as we are likely to have.”—Wall Street Journal In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s classic, A Midwife’s Tale, comes this groundbreaking narrative by one of America’s most promising colonial historians. Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England’s history, but it was hugely impactful on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges.

Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage. National Book Award–winning histories such as The Hemingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family have raised our awareness about America’s intimately mixed black and white past. Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice. At the center of Graybill’s history is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre, on a par with the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, an episode set in motion by the murder of Malcolm Clarke and in which Clarke ’s two sons rode with the Second U.S. Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives.