This Impressive family history is, in a rare departure from the historical norm, focused on author Lynn Wenzel’s maternal family lines as well as the paternal. As a feminist historian well versed in scouting out hidden female figures, she does an unflinching job of researching the often less well-documented lives of her female forbears—including those whose politics she disagrees with—as well as the male line.
And a remarkable history it is, one interlaced with the earliest founding of this country, even before it became the nation/state we know today. Family forebears included educators, soldiers, adventurers, gamblers, murderers, and miners. As a talented storyteller, Wenzel brings each ancestral tale alive.
This impressive tome covers multiple generations of her ancestors, illuminating our history with personal story after story. When we see her forbears’, lives intersect with famous “Wild West” folk like the Earp brothers in Tombstone, Arizona, we understand more intimately the violent Western conflict between miners and ranchers. The former, she explains, were mostly Republicans from Northern states, while many ranchers were Confederate sympathizers and Democrats. While their fight was over the use of land and cattle theft, the politics ran deeper. And Lynn Wenzel’s late 19th century ancestor was right there.
Puritans, Patriots and Pioneers: An American Story, is not only deeply researched and well told, but it is a physically beautiful production. Photographs and pull quotes decorate every page, printed on fine paper, inviting readers to dip in and out of the text. Original documents and gravestones are gorgeously reproduced. With this impressive production and amazing research, Puritans, Patriots and Pioneers sets a new gold standard for genealogical research and provides a fascinating, idiosyncratic dip into lives lived long ago, yet facing timeless dilemmas: How do I make my way in this world, who will I love, how and where will I raise a family and keep them safe? Through this extraordinary history we get a glimpse into myriad lives and the equally myriad ways people have answered this question.
~ Joan Steinau Lester is the Winner of the PEN-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence for
LOVING BEFORE LOVING: A MARRIAGE IN BLACK AND WHITE and the author of six critically acclaimed books. including Mama’s Child, a finalist for the PEN/Bellweather Prize and the Northern California Book Award. The Washington Post included Fire In My Soul, her biography of Eleanor Holmes Norton in its top-listed, “What Washingtonians are Reading.”
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From one ancestral family’s narrowly escaping death during King Philip’s murderous war, to a seventeen-year-old youth’s barely surviving a winter isolated and abandoned in a crude cabin while the Stephen-Townsend-Murphy Party made its way over the Sierras, Lynn Wenzel’s ancestors often led lives that served to forge their desendants’ resolve and their furtures. Wenzel’s family history is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the nation that it’s no surprise that her relatives crossed pathes with Wyatt Earp and his brothers or that she is related to Gene Stratton Porter, a beloved author. Meticulously, Wenzel’s genealogy qualifies as a scholarly work. But is also the story of America and the emigrants who carved out their own niches in the counrtry’s history. Generations of men and women were extraordinarily courageous as they fought through the tragic losses of children, businesses and homes. Puritans, Patriots and Pioneers: An American Story reads as though we are watching the author’s hand turning the pages of her mother’s and father’s family history. It is their story, and in part, it is ours, too.
~Judith McCarrick, Assistant Dean, University of California, Santa Cruz (ret.). Co-author of Exploring the United States Past & Present.