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BOOK CLUB
Join us to discuss a variety of books related (sometimes vaguely) to genealogy or history. We hope to learn a few things and have a lively discussion each month. Open to the public.
To attend please REGISTER for the event on by clicking on the event in our Upcoming Events list on our homepage.
2025 Book List
January 2025 The Hollywood Strangler by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
February 2025 The Women by Kristin Hannah
March 2025 Not my Father's Son by Alan Cumming
April 2025 The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake & Fire of 1906 by Matthew J. Davenport
May 2025 It’s All Relative: Adventures Up & Down the World’s Family Tree by A. J. Jacobs
June 2025 Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball
July 2025 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
August 2025 No Meeting
September 2025 The Book Lover’s Library by Madeline Martin
October 2025 Love’s Legacy: Viscount Chateaubriand and the Irish Girl by Daniel Fallon
November 2025 Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity & Love by Dani Shapiro
December 2025 No Meeting
Past Books We've Read:
November 2024: The Search for My Abandoned Grandmother by Mary Ames Mitchell. The author, a member of MCGS, describes the book on her website: "Bitten by the genealogy bug after researching my father’s family, I begin looking into the life of my maternal grandmother, Eileen Thomas Hopkins. Eileen had died someplace in Great Britain in 1933 at age 41, when my mother, Betty May Hopkins, was only eight. Mom’s father, Prynce Hopkins, quickly replaced Eileen with Mom’s stepmother, who bristled at any mention of her predecessor. My grandfather, a wealthy American, brought my mom and the stepmother to California in 1939, when the Germans began bombing their home in London. By the time I was doing my research in 2000, no one knew where my grandmother Eileen had died or was buried. No one knew what happened to her parents after Mom left England. In this book, I journal my trip to England to meet my English cousins and find my grandmother’s grave. I also transcribe parts of my grandfather Prynce’s old journals in which he described courting Eileen and their marriage. The mystery is, someone vandalized the journals, cutting out the details about my grandmother’s death."
October 2024: The Deserter's Tale by Nathan Dylan Goodwin
August 2024: The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
This book was featured on NPR's 'Book of the Day' here.
July 2024: Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
This author won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for this book.
June 2024:
by Richard Edwards and Jacob Friefeld
There is an author talk on the National Archives' YouTube page; skip ahead to 7:40 to find the start of the conversation.
April 2024: The Wager by David Grann
May 2024: Finding Baby Holly by Holly Marie
March 2024: Buried Secrets by Anne Hanson
February 2024: The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts
January 2024: The Library Book by Susan Olean
December 2023: No book club
November 2023: The Lost King: The Search for Richard III by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones
October 2023: The Pirate's Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd by Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos
September 2023: Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her by Erika Bolstad
August 2023: I Know Who You Are - How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter
July 2023: The Chester Creek Murders (Venator Cold Case Series Book 1) by Nathan Dylan Goodwin. The author's page for the series is here.
June 2023: The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan. He started out life in County Waterford in Ireland. During his relatively short life (he died age 44) he resided in England, France, Australia, New York, and Montana, and made history in virtually all of those places. The author's page for the book is here. His service in the Union Army during the US Civil War is here.
May 2023: Paging the Dead by Brynn Bonner The first in the author's Family History Mysteries series of novels. The concept has recently also been converted into a Hallmark Movie, in which the books' lead character, genealogist Sophreena McClure, is reimagined as Sophie McClaren.
April 2023: The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. The author's webpage for her book is here. The story is the the "fictionalized-true" story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a sniper in the Russian Army during World War 2. Nicknamed "Lady Death" by the press, she became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt.
March 2023: All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner. The author's website is here, and there's a video 'trailer' about the book here. A remarkable summary of the progression of fascism, and what ordinary people chose to do in the face of the threat.
February 2023: Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca by Ferdinand Mount. From the publisher's description: "Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars."
January 2023: The Last Slave Ship, by Ben Raines. "The incredible true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day--by the journalist who discovered the ship's remains." The Center for Brooklyn History has posted their interview with Ben Raines on YouTube. Also highly recommended: The Smithsonian webpage about The Slave Wrecks project work on the Clotilda, the Netflix documentary 'Descendant', and the website belonging to the Clotilda Descendants Association, The Clotilda Story.
November 2022: This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving
October 2022: Small Time by Russell Shorto - "Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America." The New York State Writer's Institute posted an chat with the author on YouTube. NPR spoke with the author also.
September 2022: The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan - "...tells the unbelievable true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that."
August 2022: The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict (we'll compare/contrast July and August's books, by the same author) You can read a short biography of Belle da Costa Greene on the Morgan Library's site here: https://www.themorgan.org/belle-greene and there's an NPR interview of the authors here: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/08/31/1031802246/the-story-of-j-p-morgans-personal-librarian-and-why-she-chose-to-pass-as-white
There's also information about her on the Morgan Library webpage here: https://www.themorgan.org/belle-greene
July 2022: Carnegie's Maid by Marie Benedict - "...tells the story of the brilliant woman who spurred Andrew's transformation from ruthless industrialist into the world's first true philanthropist." The author's page is here: https://www.authormariebenedict.com/carnegies-maid.html
June 2022: Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy by Helene Stapinski. The author's page is here: http://www.helenestapinski.com/books/murder-in-matera/
May 2022: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. There are a number of additional sources to read about these events, including the Osage Nation's page, the FBI's page, the Oklahoma Historical Society's page, and an episode of NPR's Fresh Air.
April 2022: In The Blood by Steve Robinson - A genealogical mystery set in Cornwall, England. This is the author's first book; he's written several since. You can find his full catalog on his website here: https://steve-robinson.me/Welcome.html
March 2022: Finding Family - My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA by Richard Hill. The author created the DNA Testing Advisor website (now under other management) and currently manages a website of DNA Favorites.
Feb 2022: The Cowkeeper's Wish by Tracy Kasaboski & Kristen den Hartog
The authors, who are sisters, have an extensive related website: https://thecowkeeperswish.com/ that includes photos, illustrations and additional information on many of their family members.
Jan 2022: Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret, by Steve Luxenberg
There is an interview with the author via NPR here.
The author has also posted family photos, and documents he found during his research on his website here.
Nov 2021: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver by Jane Little Bodkin Read more about this book on the author's page here: https://janelittlebotkin.com/2019/02/jane-street-and-the-rebel-maids-sex-syndicalism-and-denvers-capitol-hill/