about the site

In the summer of 1997, just after my junior year of college, I decided to make use of this relatively new tool called the internet to try to find my paternal grandfather. This was less for me than for my father, who I thought deserved a chance to reconcile with the man who abandoned him in his childhood, regardless of whether or not he had ever expressed any interest in doing so. 

Ancestry.com had just launched the year before. At the time, it was a free service with a very small repository of information—the Social Security Death Index and perhaps some city directories among them—but it contained just enough information for me to determine that my grandfather had died two years before, news that my father took with seeming indifference. 

I was no longer indifferent to the story, however. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that I had family—not just the absent grandfather figure but close family—still living in North Carolina. I wanted to know something about them as well, about our common family story, our shared genetic quirks. Family history soon became a passion.

It would take another two decades for me to discover what became of my grandfather after he disappeared from my father’s life and another few years for me to summon the grace to forgive him—all of which I chronicle on this site. In the interim, I threw myself into genealogical research.

When I examine my family history, my primary focus is on uncovering wisdom for how to live. While I still approach my research with the same seriousness I would employ if I were aiming to meet the professional Genealogical Proof Standard, I am decidedly less fussy than a professional would be about using documents to prove claims about my family. More often than not, the documents themselves offer up their own claims to truth; my job is simply to glean what I can from the historical records.

In addition to preserving parts of my family history, I am using this space to archive my published writing, all of which can be found in the Publications and Book sections of this site.

Please feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments or would like advice about creating a living archive of your own. I’d be happy to chat!

Thank you for visiting. I hope you enjoy your time here.

Joanna Manning is a graduate of Syracuse University and the Rainier Writing Workshop, where she earned an MFA in creative nonfiction. Her columns have been featured in the Tacoma News Tribune, and her essays have appeared in Moss, Water~Stone Review, Tahoma Literary Review, The Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology and Culture, and others. Her first book of essays, Now I Understand You, was released in 2022.