When I first started researching my family history, my goal was to find all the birth, marriage and death dates of each of my ancestors. As I was filling in each of these blanks, I started collecting little tidbits of these ancestorsÕ lives. I was fascinated, I wanted to know more.
I have written a couple of short stories on a few of my ancestors and have always wanted to write about my third great grandfather, Captain Henry Dearborn Harriman. I had known he was a sea captain and that he had died in Russia while on a voyage, but little more than that. I started chronicling his last few years of life. By tracking the vessels he captained in the shipping news of old newspapers, I found that I could trace his whereabouts not only for those years Ð but decades previous. Each discovery became another piece to the puzzle. What I thought was going to be a hundred piece puzzle turned out to be a several thousand piece puzzle!