Our list of Albuquerque Genealogical Society book authors keeps growing. AGS member Karen Jones has recently published her book Adventures with the Ancestors, a collection of stories featuring the family ancestors that also presents an overview of early American history. The book is well researched, and the stories are well told in a friendly personal style. You will be surprised by the unexpected details that make history come to life.
Karen did not set out to write a book, only stories of her ancestors. In the preface of her book, Karen explains: “After 40 years of family history research and many travels to places where the ancestors lived, I found myself surrounded by such a great cloud of forefathers that I could no longer imagine getting their lives into a proper family history book. So, I decided just to tell some of their stories that I found interesting and enlightening.”
In 2018, Karen began posting the stories online in a blog that attracted many followers. Beginning with pioneer ancestors who arrived in Jamestown, she wrote stories of first settlers in all the colonies except New England, documented in records from their own times and places. She interwove enough general American history to put the characters in context and included maps and historical images, as well as her own photographs and experiences in following their tracks. After more than three years of writing the weekly Facebook blog called “KWJ Ancestor Adventures,” Karen had told over 120 stories, enough for a book.
She was encouraged in her writing by her fellow members of the AGS Special Interest Group: Writing and Publishing, led by Mike Blackledge. Writing the stories was a good project for the shelter-at-home time of the Covid pandemic.
Readers will find that Adventures with the Ancestors is much more than a book of ancestor stories. Their personal experiences reveal much about the great themes of American settlement—why immigrants came, how the colonies differed from each other, how they attracted immigrants, and why and how those pioneers kept moving west. And readers will experience the darker side of American history—how the Native Americans were treated, and how slavery began, expanded, and finally ended.
The sampling of ancestors includes both rich and poor, influential, and unknown. The stories tell of the conflicts and later acceptance between people with different origins and religious beliefs, including Anglicans, Huguenots, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and Puritans. The colonial ancestors in this book lived from New York to Georgia, and their descendants moved west through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, on their way to Missouri. Well over half the stories take place before the Revolutionary War!
The book cover gives more details: “You’ll encounter indentured servants and plantation owners in 17th century Virginia, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, and Germans in the Hudson Valley, a caveman in Pennsylvania, land speculators in the Shenandoah Valley, strong women and wronged women, lawbreakers in North Carolina, pioneers of Kentucky, frontier preachers, Patriots of the American Revolution, an escaped slave from Florida, Civil War soldiers, and early settlers of Missouri. Readers will feel their fears of the unknown, their joy in successes, and their pain in losses. You may recognize some of the names: DuBois, Van Meter, Hite, Bryan, Boone, Linville, and Wren. Their experiences are documented in contemporary records, including writings of Washington and Jefferson which are cited in the book.”
Karen began her family history research in 1982 by interviewing the family elders, then researched at the Albuquerque Special Collections Library (now the Genealogy Center) and beyond. She writes: “I’ve trekked through many a graveyard and family site from Missouri eastward and have spent days in libraries, museums, and at historical sites to understand more about the lives and times of the ancestors. And then, with the advent of the Internet, ‘new’ old ancestors have risen from their graves to appear on the computer screen.”
Now you can meet these early American pioneers on the pages of Karen’s book, available from Amazon.com, Adventures with the Ancestors. Some of them may be your ancestors as well.
