Bonfield And Morrison, Roxana's Children

Abstract

Social histories are now commonplace in the discipline, but a new direction has emerged--family history. Roxana's Children tells the story of Roxana Brown Walbridge Watts, who lived during the early to mid-nineteenth century on a Vermont farm and who raised eleven children and one grandchild, half of whom stayed at home, while the others moved as far west as California. Even for traditional historians, Roxana's Children should be appealing since they, her offspring, toiled in the textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, took part in the great westward push across the continent, fought in the Civil War, and even panned for gold in California. Their vocations were also as varied: farmer, soldier, lawyer, minister, teacher, carriage maker, artist, and, perhaps most importantly, husband or wife.