No comments about Vital records of Queen Anne Chapel (Episcopal) Fort Hunter, NY, Town of Florida, Montgomery County, 1735-1746.

2 comments about Palatine Families of New York (2 Volume Set).

1. One of the most useful books for genealogist who have Palatine ancestors in New York. Can't praise it enough.



2. If you have German ancestors in the Hudson River Valley prior to 1800 this is one of the most detailed and comprehensive books available. Over 800 familes included often with 3-4 generations of information including orgins back in German often with 2-3 more generations of information. One of the best sourced books available. Henry Jones is to be commendend for this important work. I have at least 12 family groups listed in this book and was lucky to have it provide in two volumes a huge amount of information directly to related to me. Others may not have so many connections here but if you believe you have even one or two this book will most certainly provide you much information. It also is a valuable read just for the introduction which provide many good tips on researching German famlies in the area and in Pennsylvania.

No comments about Guide to Genealogical and Biographical Sources for New York City (Manhattan), 1783-1898.

No comments about Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, Vol. III (New York City and Long Island 1657 - 1940).

1 comments about New York in the Revolution as Colony and State [Together with Supplement] 2.

1. New York mustered the second largest number of troops for the war, in total over 50,000 men! From records in the NY State Comptroller's Office these volumes provide an unique source of information for the historian or geneological researcher. There is a convenient index to the first volume.

   A must have!

4 comments about Ever True: Civil War Letters of Seward's New York 9th Heavy Artillery of Wayne and Cayuga Counties Between a Soldier, His Wife and His Canadian Family.

1. "Ever True" is a stunning account of ordinary folks in extraordinary circumstances, folks who never lose their down-to-earth qualities while they learn the ways of a more sophisticated world.

   David Sisson, Professor of English and avid genealogist




2. I started reading yesterday and could not put it down. It is so interesting to have a look at the Civil War through the eyes of those that lived it, and Saunders' historical notes are facsinating. It amazes me to think that those letters were waiting for her to find and bring back out to the light of day. I am eagerly looking forward to being able to read more later today!



3. A really great read for the Civil War history buff. Highly recommended, very readable and hard to put down. Excellent work by Lisa Saunders.



4. EVER TRUE sweeps the dust off history, reading makes one look forward to the next letter as if we were waiting for the postman.

No comments about New York State Censuses & Substitutes.

2 comments about Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration.

1. My 8th Great Grandfather was a Palatine. This book taught me more about my family history than I could ever find elsewhere. The book is a well written history book which as an interested party, I couldn't put down. If you are related to Palatines, I think you need this book !



2. No one knew that the British government way back when was really so strained for new ideas. Their colonies were prosperous, pillage was rampant, but they were so bored on the homefront that they started writing fetishistic stories about navels. That's right, as odd as it sounds, this is one of those missing-from-history-books episodes in a glorious tradition. (A superlative collection of these belly button stories is available from Random House.)

5 comments about Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History.

1. Although this book has a slow start with a lot of historical information, once you get to the Holocaust section, you will not be able to put this book down. I read it while in Vienna and after I visited Prague. I felt so connected to my surroundings and the author that I literally felt like I was in the book. Makes the enormity of the Holocaust personal and understandable. A MUST READ FOR EVERYONE!



2. This book was a beautiful personal tribute to the author's ancestors.
   
   I was engrossed in this book from the first page...although it was a slow read for me, because I wanted to grasp the intensity of the generational saga, and grasp the historical facts, correctly. Epstein has more than proved herself in this dramatic memoir of family generations, identity, and history, weaving us through time, each piece of family fabric a part of the final tapestry. The reader is given remnants and squares of fabric in a familial tapestry, of sorts, through history and time, through the horrors of war, and how it affects all the generations, from past to present. From assimilating into society and racial and religous identity, to how one views themselves and what they identify with, Epstein manages to stitch a tapestry of her family, each stitch in time adding to the fabric of her own identity. Bravo for a wonderful read!



3. This is a fascinating chronicle of three generations of the author's female ancestors. It is probably the only book in English that tells the story of Jewish women in Prague in the the first half of the twentieth century. Helen Epstein has a special talent for recreating social history and bringing it alive.



4. Beautifully written, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is also the product of very serious and exhaustive research. It is a magical and haunting book. It brings alive a period of Jewish women's history that is only now being written about in English. Travelling through pre-Holocaust Central Europe with Epstein is an amazing experience: the reader follows both the process of investigation of family history and the emotions this opens up for the writer.
   
   I taught the book several times both in the US and Mexico in classes on Memory and Autobiography. My students loved the book. Many of them bought several copies to give to relatives and friends as gifts. My graduate students (in History and Literature) were impressed by the rigor of Epstein's research, and the skill with which she weaves historical information into her prose.



5. In WHERE SHE CAME FROM, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based award-winning author Helen Epstein has penned a meticulously-researched memoir to the four generations of Czech and former Czechoslovak women in her extensive family, from her mother's side of the brood.
   
   While today she associates her public persona to the proud and extensive line of former Czechoslovak Epsteins (see Ms. Epstein's fabulous Amazon Short available off of this site, SWIMMING AGAINST STEREOTYPE: The Story of a Twentieth Century Jewish Athlete), the writer stakes her claim to a noble and illustrious family line which once proudly sported famous Viennese and Prague-based surnames such as Rabinek, Solar, Weigert, Sachsel, Furcht, and Frucht.
   
   Like an experienced batsman for a World Series-winning major-league baseball team, Epstein managed to hang in that old batter's box, waiting for just the right pitch to slug out of the ballpark. In the book world, the analogue was when all the right moments fortuitously transpired to assist Ms. Epstein in securing many essential clues of research which she utilized handily in crafting this excellent book's narrative. Even she'll tell you, the process was far from easy.
   
   Thanks to a dedicated coterie of like-minded collaborators based in points all around the globe as you'll soon read (the former Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Israel, South America, and the United States), Ms. Epstein succeeded in cobbling together one of the most comprehensive Czech geneological histories on the public record.
   
   The work is not only emotionally remunerative for Ms. Epstein, to the extent that those missing links in her family chain were finally sewn together, but it's additionally a fine account of several strong women, renowned in their various fields of endeavour, who persevered during the best of times and the absolute horrorific worst of the 20th century.
   
   Starting with Helen's great-grandmother Therese Sachsel, nee Frucht (Furcht), who lived during the reign of Franz-Josef in the last of the Habsburg-ian thrones, passing through her grandmother Pepi's life story during the turbulent First World War and the First Czechoslovak Republic, and finally overlapping the history of her own mother Frances Epstein, Helen pored over hundreds (if not thousands) of archival sources in constructing this cogent tale.
   
   Collectively, these three noble upstanding women belonging to the author's colourful past outlived the worst of the 20th century's ravages, passing fads, and tragic downfalls.
   
   We swoon with Therese Sachsel during the euphoria of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk's (TGM) storied first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), when all seemed possible for the Central European remant of the former Austria-Hungarian powerhouses of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia. Our hopes and dreams are temporarily crushed alongside her grandmother Pepi Rabinek as we witness the invasion and subsequent occupation of Prague by Nazi hordes, who sweep unchallenged through the former Czechoslovakia's borders after the West's perfidy of Munich. We agonize alongside Pepi's daughter, Frances Solar/Rabinek/Epstein, the paragon of the family and Helen's stalwart mother, as she is dispatched to the Teresienstadt (in modern-day Terezin, Czech Republic) concentration camp, or in the colloquial Czech, the "koncentrak." We also rejoice when Frances is extricated from the hellhole of Auschwitz, and tranported the West in wartime Germany as part of a labour brigade, towards the oncoming Allies from the West, liberated in Bergen-Belsen by British forces at the end of WWII. Finally, we are shocked to discover the insensitivity, sheer apathy, and in many instances -- outright hostility -- that Praguers demonstrated towards the surviving returnees from the Nazi camps, to which Frances and her future husband, famous former Czechoslovak Olympian swimmer, Kurt Epstein, counted themselves.
   
   Helen Epstein's lines draw us inexorably into this story, and once you start you'll have a difficult time finding excuses to stop.
   
   What staggered me as I made my way through this read was Ms. Epstein's formidable discipline. The sheer single-mindedness with which she approached the colossal task of the near-vertical climb to reach the bottom of her family's history. I read with awe how solace was found towards the end.
   
   WHERE SHE CAME FROM will stand as one of the foremost examples of the self-researched memoir. If you need any reason at all to read this book, then let it be thanks to the iron-willed determination which the answers gracing its pages were unearthed by Ms. Epstein.
   
   A book like this needs to be savoured for its significance, appreciated for its illumination, and respected for its purity. There isn't a single letter which graces these pages that wasn't typed, written, or transcribed in the absence of a labour which can only be termed love.
   
   I sit back and wish we all had the staying power of Ms. Epstein. The book is laudatory in the extreme.
   
   As if Ms. Epstein's family history were not enough, there are other benefits to this book too. For those with a keen interest in the past two centuries of life in Prague and the experiences of Bohemia's and Moravia's Jews and its Czech peasantry, WHERE SHE CAME FROM is chock-a-block with painstaking factoids and historical tidbits that'll nudge you gently towards further reading. It will also supply its readers with a glimpse towards the increasingly-distant Czechoslovak past, which, with the passing of the years and the keener integration of this country with the rest of the EU, slips further and further away from the grip of Czech youth.
   
   This book is more than just a reminder, it's a testament to a time which no longer exists. In that respect, it is now part of the permanent historical record.
   
   WHERE SHE CAME FROM is written in a language at once accessible and magnetic. For all ages, for all backgrounds. I can't do anything less than award this superb work of history my highest rating of 5-stars.
   
   I know you will too.
   
   -- ADM in Prague

4 comments about The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America.

1. I read this book from an architect's viewpoint, and it squares with my experience that there is something about homebuilding that is intensely personal. Much has been written about visionary Designers. In fact, it is the clients who hire and steer those designers who are writing their world views large. I visited Kykuit once and thought the design was quirky for a pile from the mansion age...quirky but with vim & vigor, bold but not bombastic. Now I know how it got to be that way.



2. This is much more than a book on the building of a house. It is about three generations of a family, their individual personalities, their character and development over time, all centered around the construction of a house that became a national monument. It is about their time and place in history. It is well written, a delight to read and leaves the reader yearning to know about the succeeding generation.
   Bob McGill



3. Lee and Robert Dalzell have put together a very fascinating look at both the history of the home that generations the Rockefeller family occupied, how they built it, wrestled over it, disagreed about it and loved it which reflected the complicated relationships of the dynasty. Not unlike many parent and sibling relationships, there were arguments about what their parents' intentions were, Senior's and Junior's, Abby's, etc. and how they lived their lives based on interpretations of their parental affinities. The home (house?) becomes the symbol of the old world of privilege as well as a modern world of the current generation. The house and now the entire estate essentially was cobbled together and pulled apart as each new generation left its own footprints.
   I particularly enjoyed trying to separate Lee's from Robert's "story" as well as the intertwining story of the house and the family.



4. This is a very well written book about the iconic Rockefellers and their family estate. It's interesting how the house seems to act as a metaphor for each of the family member's, their interests, their desires. Kykuit is an amazing set peice and the mixture of Jr.'s Bosworth and Ogden Codman classical estate, Sr's wanting the house to be tasteful and not too grand, and Nelson's avande garde, modern tastes. The estate and it's location are breathtaking and the Codman interiors are exquisite. This is a very well researched and fascinating study of the Rockefellers and their Kykuit. I do recommend getting the Rockefeller Family Home: Kykuit, it's very good.