Exploring Lives

A farm woman in Victory, New York, a schoolteacher in Manfred, North Dakota, a mechanical engineer in Greenville, South Carolina, a struggling waitress in Rochester, New York, a would-be socialite in Los Angeles, California, and a devout Protestant housewife in Brownsville, Pennsylvania---what could these six people possibly have in common? Just this: each kept an autograph book in which friends and acquaintances inscribed rhymes, quotations, proverbs, and Bible verses as tokens of remembrance. Their autograph books somehow survived the passage of decades and eventually inspired a most unusual biographical quest.
Tracking the life of each autograph-book keeper, Exploring Lives takes us into a time when many Americans still grew up on farms, steel and cotton mills thrived, and women were just starting to find careers outside the home. In addition to biographical sketches of six autograph-book keepers, Exploring Lives provides transcriptions of their autograph books and also capsule biographies of autograph-book signers, more than two hundred people whose life stories touch on thirty-nine states and eight foreign countries. Exploring Lives shows that given enough detail, enough knowledge, we cannot help but find every life extraordinary.