The Parrett Migration

Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award for historical biography, "The Parrett Migration" recounts a fascinating story about five frontier families who were not the sort of people typically written about in books. The Parretts weren't generals, social reformers, or celebrated leaders of any kind. They were large farming families, who acquired and cultivated large tracts of land, each succeeding generation moving on to the next frontier. Except for land, census, and military records, their lives were largely lost to history-until now.

Dawn Parrett Thurston, an eighth-generation descendant of Frederick Parrett, her earliest-known paternal ancestor, became intrigued with the family during her college days. As she embarked on what became a decades-long study of the Parretts, her research took her to Switzerland and Germany, where she followed the route of Frederick's eighteenth-century emigrant journey down the Rhine River to the port where he embarked to America. She visited Frederick's farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and drove the western migration routes taken by the four generations that immediately followed him, standing on the soil of their former farms in Tennessee, Ohio, and Iowa.

As the author examined available family records against the backdrop of American history, she came to see that the Parrett story was part of a much larger, absorbing narrative. "The Parrett Migration" spans nearly two hundred years of American history, a period when the country was in a constant state of flux, its borders ever expanding, its citizens embarking on exhausting and sometimes dangerous migrations in their quest for more land. The author discovered that her ancestors were on the trails during all the major migrations, traveling on foot, on horseback, and in covered wagons, forsaking the comforts of a settled situation, even a prosperous situation, to carve a new life for themselves out of the wilderness. The Parrett Migration is more than a family story, it turns out: it's America's story. And for many Americans, it's their ancestral story, too.