Following William Hilton the Elder onto the Fortune — the late, half-sized, unprovisioned second ship to Plymouth — and back off again to the salt works on the Piscataqua.

Following Humphrey Chadbourne from the first framed house on the Piscataqua to the Maine hayfield where archaeologists dug up his front-door key, his silver spoon, and forty thousand pieces of the life he built after it.

Following Thomas Stanton from the burning of the Pequot village at Mystic — where he asked leave to fire on two men — to the forty years afterward, when the sachem Uncas trusted him to write his will.

Following Lucretia Williams from a Saco courtroom that spent thirteen years forbidding her marriage — to a single unnamed line in a minister's war narrative, the only document ever written about her.

Following Peter Grant, John Taylor, and John Clark from the rout at Dunbar in 1650 — through a hundred-mile forced march, a mass grave under Durham Cathedral, and a sale by the pound to a failing iron works — to the oldest charity in the Western Hemisphere.

Following Dorothy Milbury and her eleven-year-old niece Bethia Payne out of the January 1692 raid on York, Maine — through a will that couldn't say whether Dorothy was alive, and seven years in Canada that nobody wrote down.

Losing twice to the same colony in eighteen months — Noah Wiswall dead in the New Hampshire woods for Massachusetts Bay, his brother Ichabod in London watching Massachusetts Bay erase Plymouth.

Walking both roads out of a family legend — a Maine colonel court-martialed for missing the battle, a New Hampshire stone wall on the Mystic beach — and finding that what Reuben Wentworth's family really kept was the fifty-one years afterward.

Falling hard for a false family tree — Mayflower passenger, Salem accuser, Longfellow cousin and all — and then dismantling it, because Abraham Parker's real parents were quieter, but true.

Marching Charles Haynes out of Sudbury on the first morning of the American Revolution, and reasoning him back onto a road when the records aren't cooperating.