Five Generations, One Story

I'm a historical researcher and storyteller dedicated to uncovering the forgotten stories of America's past. Over 20 years of writing, I've learned that the best details are the ones nobody thought to write down. Not the battles and treaties, but the daily, unglamorous work of surviving.

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Right now, I'm writing a multi-generational family drama that started as genealogical research into my own immigrant family history. It follows one family across roughly 150 years, from a homestead in 1880s South Dakota through Irish immigrant life, midcentury womanhood, and into the present. Each generation carries something forward that the one before it couldn't say out loud. The story isn't really about any one era. It's about what gets buried, and what it costs to finally dig it up.

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I write from family documents, oral histories, and historical research, because I want every detail, from the weather to the silence, to be true. My connection to this material is personal. My craft is professional. I built this site to bring the two together.

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I'm driven by curiosity to understand. Between my education and years of proposal writing, I've built the skill to dig through a mess of information and find the real story underneath it. What I've found along the way is fascinating, and I've written about it on the blog. Visit Historical Research to find out how our ancestors actually survived the prairie in the 19th century.

 

A few short stories live in this same world: different lives, always fighting to survive and thrive. They may never make it into the books, but they were part of how I found my way into this story. The first one's coming to the blog soon.