At some point in our lives, most of us start to wonder about our family: Who were our ancestors? Where did they live? What did they endure? Were they like us?

Inspired by the stories he had heard from his relatives, and making use of his experience as a prize-winning historian, Paul C. Nagel started investigating his own heritage. What he discovered will encourage anyone curious about long-ago branches of the family tree.

"There is something stirring about finding a bond with a remote grandmother of grandfather who struggle to survive when the Black Death stalked Europe, " Nagel writes, "or who had the courage to travel halfway around the globe to a place called Missouri."

With hard work, plenty of luck and a yen to know why thins happened, Nagel found forebears as far back as the 1500s and fleshed out their stories. Then he tracked generation after generation through good times and adversity, through public esteem and private shame.

Paul Nagel’s family represents only a fragment of the story of German migration to Missouri, which in turn represents only a fragment of the story of America. Yet in his hands that fragment brings alive the story of all people whose ancestors escaped an Old World and helped build a new.