In the mid-1830s, a New England man began to write the first of what would be volumes of journals covering more than six decades of his life and experiences, reflections, and family history. Born in 1807, he grew up in the Connecticut River Valley town where his great-great-great-great grandfather was an early seventeenth-century proprietor. Ample evidence of his family's prominence in the community and nearby, including the church a great uncle built, persists today. Sure of the biblically-inspired significance of lineage, he became, like many New England men before him, a chronicler. He kept careful, even elaborate family records, and he pursued genealogical research through new American historical and genealogical organizations as well as in local record offices in England to tell him of the ancestry he could not learn from near kin or local institutions. Like many Americans, he was deeply interested not only in his...

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