Home-Nest Chronicles

Cover illustration:  Leda Whitney (1935 photo), with Caubvick (as painted by the artist Nathaniel Dance in about 1772). Through my soul's eye, both my face and my heart look like Caubvick. -- (Leda Whitney Sturtevant)

For several enjoyable years of retirement we have sought to confirm and flesh out sometimes skeletal stories. Of course, there was one danger. In the process of setting the record straight, a once favorite tale lost much of its attraction, the victim of over enthusiastic embellishment by past generations: (happily, this unforeseen disappointment was far more than offset by exciting new discoveries in our research!). A forgotten truth can be as dangerous as a remembered lie! It is good to consider that if a story is worth telling, it warrants protecting its integrity through the disciplined check afforded by an enduring and reliable guidebook, such as we hope this volume will prove to be.

 We believe that weaving in appropriate bite-sized bits of contemporaneous history can serve to establish the proper context of family accounts and to better assure their remembrance. Stories that are skimpily told can be like old photo album snapshots with inadequate identification -- meaningless faces appearing in unidentified places -- snippets of lives that fail to convey any understanding of their true social, political, and spiritual significance. Such poorly told stories can die the death of uncaptioned photo albums, relegated by the uninformed to trash heaps of irrelevance and disinterest. Our format for story telling is thus designed to help prevent such loss. The book's "Introduction" shares some of the lessons we learned and provides suggestions for readers who may wish to publish their own family histories.

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