In 1930 Abby Nichols is an eight-year-old girl growing up in Maine, but as the Depression deepens, and her mother dies, the responsibility of taking care of her family falls to her, and she has to put her dreams of going to college and becoming a writer on hold.

Provides an introduction to genealogy and offers tips on how to get started in family research, discussing last names, rules to follow, family trees, and myths in genealogy.

"Georgia cannot figure out what's going on in her family. Her mother, Francie, is extremely overprotective. Her grandmother, Dana, and her great-grandmother, Abby, don't speak to each other. And Georgia's great-great-grandmother also had some secrets that nobody else knows about. Georgia knows this because she's found her great-great grandmother's diary hidden in a wall in the family's house in Maine. Reading the diary makes her think of her own...

In 1977 in Princeton, Dana's daughter seven-year-old Francie is struggling to keep her dyslexia a secret from her teachers and family, and even the thought of high school and college is part of the remote and unattainable future.

Discusses the family tree as a tool for conducting genealogy research, offering advice on how to interview family members and others, and including tips on how to draw an extended family tree.

A guide to collecting primary records to find facts about one's ancestors that covers birth and death certificates, immigration and naturalization records, news clipping and obituaries, the census, cemeteries, and other types of records to search.

An introduction to immigration, describing when and why European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic people came to live in the United States, and discussing the dangers involved in traveling to a new country.