Our Ancestors Had Dreams...

A generation that ignores history has no past—and no future.—Robert A. Heinlein

Our ancestors had dreams too—for themselves and the people they loved. When those dreams disappear from memory, so does everything they fought for. That is what these stories are for: not just to remember, but to make sure the remembering means something.

Joel Stratton dreamed of Harvard and the law. When his father died and that door closed, he walked through every other one—canal driver, constable, doctor, spy—until the war and his wounds finally stopped him. Isaac King wanted nothing more than to pull his weight on a farm in the Haw Patch. In 1862 he lied about his age, carried that dream into battle after battle, hauled ammunition up Missionary Ridge on a foot that never stopped bleeding, and came home with one answer: “We did what had to be done. And we came home.” My father dreamed in radio waves and went to France at twenty-one to keep the signals humming, coming home with poison in his body that would steal him from us two decades later. My mother dreamed of escape and got it at sixteen on a train to Michigan with a marriage license full of lies—picking herself up from bad choices, violence, and loss, running a diner, raising a child in her mid-life. At seventy-four, after burying her fourth husband, she told the Social Security lady, “After four husbands, number five is going to be damn hard to find.”

That is why this site exists. Not a museum or a monument, but a living room where the family can sit down together across the centuries. Karen and I have spent more than fifty years gathering the pieces—the letters, the records, the photographs, the stories nobody else thought to save. Once you start listening to the dead, you find you can’t stop. They have too much to say.

— Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026