John Borrowman

I wrote this book to fill in the gaps of what my family knew about this ancestor. He was a hired hand with no chance of ever farming his own ground. The story of how he came to America and became a farmer is one of hard work sacrifice, and a little bit of luck.

You might think that writing someone's story is a pretty straightforward project; simply a matter of connecting the dots. Depending on the life you’re examining, though, some dots can be faint or even non-existent. If you’re lucky, you start with a few dots and by turning them in the kaleidoscope so to speak, you see new dots. By considering how people act in similar situations, you can assume even more dots.

These are flesh-and-blood people, though, with thoughts and feelings about where they went and what they did. They are not people to whom life simply happened. To tell their story more fully, I reached beyond the dots to capture those thoughts and feelings. That’s why I call it a “re-constructed family story.”