Author Description

Turn the pages of your family scrapbook or picture album and faces and memories leap out at you. Even if you never knew or don't remember some of your relatives, the snapshots and keepsakes make them familiar, and the old family stories never fail to bring a laugh and a warm memory. Now turn through the albums of other families--many other families--and see their grandfathers' and great-grandmothers' faces and read their stories. Why did they leave the old country? How did they get to America? What did they do when they got here? Why did they live the way they did? What did they think of the new homeland? What did other people think about them? How did they get along? The family album holds some of the answers. The American Family Albums tell the multicolored and often heroic stories of American immigrant groups, largely through their own words and pictures. Like any family album or scrapbook, the pages contain many period photographs and other memorabilia. These join with original documents--including selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers--to bring the immigrant experience vividly to life. Each book is a pictorial and written record of the "old country" left behind, the journey to America, the life that the newcomers made for themselves in their adopted country, and the group's contributions to the brilliant diversity of these United States.