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Salt Lantern: Traces of an American Family (American Land & Life)

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SALT LANTERN: TRACES OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY is a salty journey with author, Bill Morgan, as he traces his life and records his family history. Beginning with his great-grandmother's salt-filled chimney lantern, Morgan captures his ancestral family history through his study of family homes, landforms, letters, and family artifacts.

Morgan travels back through time by visiting ancestral homes in England, Ireland, Scotland; then he moves to Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and North Dakota searching for buildings and landscapes, letters and historical documents that help him tell his story.

Satl Lantern is also about Morgan himself. As a child gowing up in Pipestone, Minnesota, with a single mother, surrounded by older siblings and cousins, (his father died before he was born), Morgan uses the environment he grew up in to find his own sense of place and purpose within his immediate family and his ancestral family.

Morgan adds fresh memories written by his brothers and sister, as well as journals and other family documents to create a comprehensive American famiy history.

For anyone interested in family history, architecture, or just a good read, this book is a pearl. Photos throughout help to tell Morgan's story. Esspecially interesting is the story and photo of the Salt Lantern House that inspired Morgan to pursue this project. Morgan tells us he now has the family heirloom in his possession.

Salt Lantern by William Towner Morgan is an in-debth study of a man and his relationship with the home he was born and raised in. The story he weaves includes his personal recollections, other family members' recollections, as well as a chronological history of the structures his ancestors lived in over the centuries.

Salt Lantern is also a personal history of the various branches of Morgan's families--in England, Ireland, early America, and into the Twentieth Century. It appears he was born after the sudden death of his father, he was raised in a household of women, and he grew up not really understanding his place in the family.

Morgan seems to become the Salt Lantern, an artifact that has signifigant meaning within the family, but is not really understood. Morgan explores his own birth, life, and relationships through the structures he studies and describes.

This is a study of history, architecture, family relationships, and personal memoir. A good read.