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A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

A 2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

For more than four hundred years, members of the author's family have been telling stories about their American lives. They have told of impassioned elopements and heart-breaking kidnaps, of hairbreadth escapes and shocking murders, of bigamists, changelings, patriots, Indians, fires, floods, and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married the pirate Blackbeard by mistake.

In this beautifully written work, Andie Tucher considers family stories as another way to look at history, neither from the top down nor the bottom up but from the inside out. She explores not just what happened—everywhere from Jamestown to Boonesborough, from the bloody field at Chickamauga to the metropolis of the Gilded Age—but also what the storytellers thought or wished or hoped or feared happened. She offers insights into what they valued, what they lost, how they judged their own lives and found meaning in them. The narrative touches on sorrow, recompense, love, pain, and the persistent tension between hope and disappointment in a nation that by making the pursuit of happiness thinkable also made unhappiness regrettable. 

Based on extensive research in archives, local history societies, and family-history sources as well as conversations and correspondence, Happily Sometimes After offers an intimate and unusual perspective on how ordinary people used stories to imagine the world they wished for, and what those stories reveal about their relationships with the world they actually had.

Documents conversations between two southern writers and friends whose families were intertwined in slavery

Legacies of Slavery commemorates a story of racial reconciliation in the South.  Writers, educators, and friends Frye Gaillard and Myra Davis-Branic discovered a shared family history of slavery in Eutawville, South Carolina, where Davis-Branic’s family was enslaved by Gaillard’s family.

In 2024, the University of South Alabama’s Kern Jackson moderated three conversations with Davis-Branic and Gaillard in Mobile. These conversations are presented here in an edited format. Davis-Branic and Gaillard discussed their intertwined family history and what they each learned from research into their ancestors. They relay origin stories and the role of a key grandparent who greatly impacted their lives. They also talk about their own trajectories in a historical context, the issue of slavery in their families, and the legacy of slavery for their children and families. 

The book concludes with short excerpts, one from Davis-Branic’s book Cornbread My Soul: The Davis Family of Eutawville, South Carolina, and one from Gaillard’s family history, Lessons from the Big House: One Family’s Passage Through the History of the South, a Memoir. Legacies of Slavery stands as a powerful and unique documentation for all who are interested in how two southern families, bound by slavery in the past and now by friendship and a degree of understanding, have found some measure of redemption.
 

In an exploration of the life and customs of the Hungarian nobility, this book compares historical reality and legal literature on the example of one noble family--the Elefánthy kindred from northern Hungary (present-day Slovakia). The author begins by outlining the customary law regarding noble status, inheritance and marriage, as summarized in the famous code of Stephen Werbőczy (1514). He then compares these norms with the documentary evidence and establishes the fact that the legal literature differs in regard to social mobility and kindred solidarity.

With this frame of reference in mind, the fate of the Elefánthy family is traced through several generations, enabling the author to make some general statistical statements on inheritance, the rise and fall of various branches, marriage strategies, and the "survival skills" of the kindred. In his summary, the author outlines some of the major avenues for further research, including the peculiar Hungarian form of retainership (familiaritas), and the relationships between noble families and between the nobility and local communities.