The Wallace-White Family

In The Wallace-White Family: Images, Letters, and Legacies, Richard White takes an innovative approach to connecting with his 16 great-great grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and 4 grandparents plus one. Using black-and-white photos from the 1860s to the 2020s, White uses brief biographies as springboards for letters to his ancestors. He asks his great-great grandparents, Alexander McRobbie and Wilhelm Christian Sauer, why they left their native Scotland and Germany in the 1850s and what it was like to settle in their adopted communities of Milford, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, New York. The answers to Whites' questions about his relatives' lives, their decisions and motivations, their triumphs and sorrows, are lost in time and in the distant past. But the very act of posing the questions and imagining their answers gives White a profound sense of engaging in conversation with his ancestors. He feels closer to them than ever before--and this is the hope he shares with his readers.