As some of you know, I write biographies and memoirs. Often they are focused on someone's ancestor; other times they are my ghostwriting of an individual’s recollections. Here is why I write this sort of thing and why I truly love memorializing stories of others. And, by
Here is another fascinating story of a real person whose story had been lost until now. Sophia is unrelated to me; she is the ancestor of a client. Born on June 2, 1850, in Blean, a village in Canterbury, Kent, England, Sophia Holness lived a long, eventful life. The civil
What a nice day for a family picnic! Sometime during the late summer of 1976, a friend and I were rather aimlessly driving around the Friuli region of Italy. I wasn’t seeking anything in particular but was interested in seeing what had remained of the gorgeous medieval towns that
To paraphrase Lesley Gore: It's my soapbox and I'll preach if I want to… Know that I really don’t want to devolve into the kind of person who trolls Facebook for the sole purpose of becoming enraged. Still, there are days when I can’t
Question: What do Shakespeare and Bob Marley have in common? Answer: Facebook attributes the same incorrect quote to both. I saw this posted on Facebook the other day. First, let me say that it’s a nice little poem. Simple, straightforward, good meter, excellent use of alliteration. But it does
It was in the late summer of 1974. I had recently come to live in northern Italy, had not yet begun my final year of high school, and could not yet speak Italian. There were no English language television or radio programmes. I was sixteen years old, unhappy about my