I’ve published a new book. While organizing a pile of family letters and photos into a historical context, I learned:

• How my great-great-grandfather Charles Gordon Ames learned as a teenager that he was the illegitimate great-grandchild of one of America’s founding fathers

• Why a supposedly Christian family left Charles as a foundling in foster care to avert a family scandal

• How he overcame this obstacle to become one of New England’s most respected Unitarian ministers

• Why he and his first wife, Sarah Jane Daniels, joined the Transcendentalists in Boston to fight for abolition, women’s rights, and social reform

• Why Charles and his second wife, Fanny Baker, traveled to California after the Civil War, where he established Unitarian churches, and she joined the suffragettes

• Why, in reaction to the Panic of 1873, they organized America’s first social services to aid the urban poor

• How Fanny promoted child labor reform and public education, and helped establish Philadelphia’s first kindergartens

• And, most surprising to me, the Massachusetts State Police appointed Fanny as one of this country’s first two women police officers.

Available on Amazon in paperback. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999150510