Why am I calling my blog “Geneature”? I plan to combine two of my favorite things – books and genealogy (I couldn’t figure out how to work in chocolate!). When you do genealogy, you learn some things about your ancestors. You learn where and when they were born, got married, lived, and died. But the Read More
Geneature
The Downstairs Girl, by Stacey Lee
This is a work of historical fiction, which describes the life of a spirited young Chinese woman in 1890’s Atlanta. As you might expect, since she is not White, she faces basically the same discrimination as the African Americans she works with. At the start of the novel, she is employed at a millinery shop, Read More
Heaven’s Ditch, by Jack Kelly
The subtitle of this book is “God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal”. Much of the books is about how the Erie Canal went from being a far-fetched idea to a reality. But interspersed with the story of the canal are stories about others who lived near the route of the canal in that Read More
Cemetery Citizens, by Adam Rosenblatt
In late October, 2025, I joined a group of people in Oak Grove Cemetery in Wyandotte County, Kansas, to learn now to clean headstones. The program was hosted by the Wyandotte County Historical Museum, and there were folks from the county Parks and Rec Department to show us what to do. It was chilly and Read More
How the Post Office Created America, by Winifred Gallagher
This is a case of something being so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it anymore; in fact, we pretty much take for granted that our mail will be delivered six days a week. Has it always been this way? Well, not quite. Probably during our grandparents’ lifetimes, mail could be delivered more than once a Read More
The Road That Made America, by James Dodson
The subtitle is “A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road”. So this is part travelogue, part history lesson. Personally, I’m more interested in the history, but Dodson does make the journey itself interesting. While he has obviously planned ahead, and set up meetings with various experts along the way, he also serendipitously encounters Read More
American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild
This book discusses the years just before, during, and after The Great War. The subtitle is “The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis”. Hochschild starts with the entry of the United States into the War to End All Wars, and it was a little messier than we probably realize. Many people wanted Read More
The Whiskey Rebellion, by William Hogeland
This is one of those incidents in American history that don’t get talked about much, especially in High School history classes. In their defense, it is probably because it is a complicated subject, and class time is limited. But it is something that people who care about early American history should at least be aware Read More
America Eats!, by Pat Willard
One of the projects of the Works Progress Administration was to assign several writers and photographers to document how and what Americans were eating in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. However, the WPA program was ended before the material that had been created could be published. Some of this material has been lost, but Read More
After the Revolution, by Joseph J Ellis
The subtitle of this book is “Profiles in Early American Culture”. Ellis looks at four men who were prominent in the early days of America, just after the revolution. These were not necessarily typical Americans, however. Each were prominent, and well known at that time, in a different area of arts or letters. Only one Read More
Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870-1920, by June Granatir Alexander
The subtitle of this book is “How the Second Great Wave of Immigrants Made Their Way in America”. The time frame, 1870 to 1920, is when the largest group of immigrants arrived on our shores. This is between the Civil War, until just after World War I, when immigration rules were tightened to exclude numerous Read More