Stories bind us together, and stories drive us apart.

With the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaching, I dug through my family’s stories to see what I could piece together: a Hessian soldier fighting for the British who switched sides and was with Washington at Yorktown, an ancestor called to duty the night of Paul Revere’s ride, discovering that our favorite route from Virginia back to my native Ohio was Washington’s favorite route too, taken on the way to his disasters at Fort Necessity and with Braddock. On the “not everyone has the same stories” front, a relative of my wife’s was an early “settler” of Green county, PA and was killed by Indians who saw things differently. Similarly, my early Ohio forbearers were only a few miles from the “Big Bottom massacre” where, again “the natives” had a different story in mind.

E pluribus unum? Out of many people, we are one?

What is OUR story? What is YOUR story?

This is my deep dive with full stories: archive.org/details/1…