September 2011 Book Remarks

Brick walls could become a thing of the past, with a new edition of the late Marsha Hoffman Rising’s Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-and-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (Family Tree Books). Rising helps you get beyond burned courthouses, those tricky pre-1850 censuses, and same-named folks. New appendixes cover online research and DNA testing.

When retired attorney Quinn Parker discovers old letters in ancient Gaelic, he starts an ancestral investigation that takes him to Ireland — and opens the door to family secrets. The Gaelic Letters: A Novel of the Almost Perfect Crime by R. Thomas Roe (Signalman Publishing) is an award-winning family drama built around a century of deception.

Among those the transcontinental railroad brought to the American West was a new kind of traveler: the transient worker. Mark Wyman tells the story of these people in Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (Hill and Wang). Wyman shows you a little-known but vital part of Western culture and its agricultural economy.

In 1766, 26-year-old Jeanne Baret disguised herself as a teenage boy and joined a French expedition as an assistant to botanist Philibert Commerson — who also happened to be her lover. The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe by Glynis Ridley (Crown Publishing) unravels conflicting accounts of the pioneering journey.

From the September 2011 issue of Family Tree Magazine

More great genealogy resources from Family Tree Magazine:

• The Family Tree Sourcebook
• live and recorded expert webinars
• on-demand genealogy classes