Much family history focuses on digging around archives and web searches. Here, Karen Foy shows that our attics and cupboards can often hide a treasure trove of personal documents and ephemera. Boxes full of photographs, hastily written notes, old tickets, postcards, ration books, a soldier's hat, a bundle of letters, perhaps a diary, are all invaluable sources of information about our family history. These are crucial in piecing together the everyday lives of our ancestors, exposing secrets, and family relationships. You might discover favourite family recipes, information about their schooldays, reconstruct a Victorian family holiday. This book guides you through 200 years of different types of memorabilia: how to interpret them and how to use them to make your own family history – perhaps making a scrapbook or website.

Growing up with Swedish and Norwegian grandparents with a dash of Danish thrown in for balance, Eric Dregni thought Scandinavians were perfectly normal. Who doesn’t enjoy a good, healthy salad (Jell-O packed with canned fruit, colored marshmallows, and pretzels) or perhaps some cod soaked in drain cleaner as the highlights of Christmas? Only later did it dawn on him that perhaps this was just a little strange, but by then it was far too late: he was hooked and a dyed-in-the-wool Scandinavian himself. But what does it actually mean to grow up Scandinavian-American or to live with these Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes, and Icelanders among us? In Vikings in the Attic, Dregni tracks down and explores the significant—and quite often bizarre—historic sites, tales, and traditions of Scandinavia’s peculiar colony in the Midwest. It’s a legacy of the unique—collecting silver spoons, a suspicion of flashy clothing, shots of turpentine for the common cold, and a deep love of rhubarb pie—but also one of poor immigrants living in sod houses while their children attend college, the birth of the co-op movement, the Farmer–Labor party, and government agents spying on Scandinavian meetings hoping to nab a socialist or antiwar activist. For all the tales his grandparents told him, Dregni quickly discovers there are quite a few they neglected to mention, such as Swedish egg coffee, which includes the eggshell, and Lutheran latte, which is Swedish coffee with ice cream. Vikings in the Attic goes beyond the lefse, lutefisk, and lusekofter (lice jacket) sweaters to reveal the little-known tales that lie beneath the surface of Nordic America. Ultimately, Dregni ends up proving by example why generations of Scandinavian-Americans have come to love and cherish these tales and traditions so dearly. Well, almost all of them.* * See lutefisk.

The twisted, beloved Dollanganger legend began two generations before Corrine Foxworth locked away her children in Flowers in the Attic. The second book in a new prequel story arc, Out of the Attic explores the Dollanganger family saga by traveling back decades to when the clan’s wicked destiny first took root. Married to the handsome, wealthy Garland Foxworth following a wildfire romance and an unexpected pregnancy, young Corrine Dixon finds her life very different from how she imagined it. Often alone in the mansion of Foxworth Hall, she can practically feel the ancestors’ judgment of her as insufficient—as not a Foxworth. Stern portraits glare at her from the walls, and the servants treat her strangely. Nothing in the vast place is truly hers. Even her son, Malcolm Foxworth, born in the luxe Swan Room and instantly whisked away to a wet nurse, feels alien to her. With a husband alternately absent and possessively close, Corrine doesn’t yet realize that she’s barely scratched the surface of what lies beneath Foxworth Hall’s dark facade and the family that guards its legacies. With the fortieth anniversary celebration of Flowers in the Attic, and ten new Lifetime movies in the past five years, there has never been a better time to experience the forbidden world of V.C. Andrews.

Family Stories from the Attic is an anthology of essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry inspired by family letters, objects, and archives. Nearly two dozen contributors from the United States and Australia tell stories of immigration and migration, loss, discovery, secrets, questions, love, and the search for meaning and identity. Editors Christi Craig and Lisa Rivero bring together both experienced and new authors who will prompt writers and non-writers alike to think about their own family treasures and histories in new ways.

Ever wanted to understand more about your ancestor's sea travels? What was life like aboard ship for both passengers and crew, how long did the journey take, what kind of conditions could be expected and what exotic locations might they have visited along the way? Following the tried and tested routes established by cargo ships, Karen Foy describes the development of passenger travel, the changing face of the vessels used and the demand for both comfort and speed. From transportation to trade, adventure to emigration, through persecution or for pleasure, she explains the reasons behind our ancestor's desire for overseas travel and reveals the records and archives we can search to complete our own genealogical journey.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/FAULKER AWARD WINNER • The acclaimed author of The Swimmers and When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” a century ago in this "understated masterpiece ... that unfolds with great emotional power" (San Francisco Chronicle). In eight unforgettable sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences raising children who would later reject their culture and language, to the deracinating arrival of war. Julie Otsuka has written a spellbinding novel about identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in uncertain times.

In the bleak, forbidding house of her great-aunts, neglected twelve-year-old orphan Maggie hears ghostly voices and finds magic that awakens in her the capacity to love and be loved.