"No one comes from the earth like grass. We come like trees--we all have roots."
Maya Angelou

I have compiled the stories of my family: a Quaker who endured imprisonment in 1682 for refusing to tithe to the Church of England (a religion he did not support); a Quaker who fought in the Pennsylvania Militia in the Revolutionary war; a German family who left their homeland in 1846 and arrived in America 14 weeks later; a pioneer family who traversed the Minnesota prairie by wagon train to live on an Indian Reservation. This is my family, and I am proud of them.

A family tree can wither if no one tends its roots.