Genealogical Musings

For a quarter century, I’ve pursued genealogical minutiae—the particulars of family compositions in the townlands of Eastern County Mayo and nineteenth century records of the Juchnewicz families of Girdziunai village in Lithuania. But genealogy is more than the obsessive collection of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. The study of family history is also the study of history.

Musings traverses the sometimes grim, sometimes odd, events that occurred at the fact-jammed intersection of family history and history—a Revolutionary War massacre, the Black Tom munitions explosion in 1916, the embarkation of troops from Hoboken in World War I, the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, the lives of longshoremen in the New York harbor, and the lives of slaves on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. In our time—and a step ahead of a category 4 hurricane—Musings explores the history and culture of Jacksonville and Saint Augustine.

We meet memorable characters on these journeys through time—miserly German spymasters, a psychologically astute general, a luckless Polish legionnaire, groundbreaking female soldiers, two runaway slaves in a Virginia jail, and the Cazique of Poyais, sovereign of an imaginary country. And we meet two timeless characters—the banshee and Count Dracula.