SECOND BOOK in the "Unexpected Love" series. Caila is a no-nonsense, feisty young woman who is researching her family history. As part of her research, she spends the summer at the home built by her 4th great grandfather in 1875, a place now renovat...
REMINDER: This is NOT the first story in the series, although you can read it as a stand-alone book. The first book is entitled The Stacks which tells the love story of Harry and Regan, who are background characters in this book. Just so you know, there will be spoilers about Harry and Regan's story if you read this book first.
* * * * *
The cover page looked impressive and while my thesis was plausible, I still felt unsatisfied by the fact that I hadn't reached concrete conclusions in my studies. I had read countless other studies on similar ideas and I'd conducted a considerable amount of research with ten individuals who were willing to share extensive knowledge of their own family's histories with regards to family proximity, as well as family distance, and the effects on mental health. There were some correlations between the physical contiguity and better mental health as well as better academic performance, but it still wasn't the kind of definite conclusion I had hoped for.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Regardless, the paper was due in the morning, so I hit print and waited for the thirty-something pages of my research to be impressed upon the white paper, which I then tucked inside of a clear folder. I put everything in a safe place so I could grab it first thing in the morning, and then I went to bed but my head was still swimming with thoughts.
Maybe my question was too broad. Most likely, I had to narrow down the effect to certain kinds of mental health. I often thought back to the state of American families fifty to a hundred years ago and although I had no precise way of measuring the facts, families were typically closer in relationships and proximity. Marriages were stronger and families stayed together; there wasn't the same level of family destruction and splintering that we see in our day and age.
My uncle Steven - my mom's brother - had been married three times, had a smattering of children and then had two more children with two more women to whom he wasn't married. That's what I mean by splintering. The family tree looks like it was hit by lightning. I'm not naive, and I understand that not all marriages were happy in the past and that people sometimes had children out of wedlock. I was a prime example, although not being born in the distant past, my parents had me before they were married. But the question that had plagued me ever since I was young was why so many families seem to be falling apart in modern times versus the ones that stuck together through thick and thin in the past. It had to be, in some capacity, related to mental and emotional health. Since the question had been a major part of my life, I had decided to pursue it in my own education endeavors and now I was feeling a bit disillusioned that I hadn't come to a concrete conclusion.
I was aware that evolving values and morals obviously played a clear role as well, but why the seeming sudden evolution of traditional values that had been largely unchanged for centuries? These were the things that kept me up at night.
Anyway, all those reasons are why I decided to study my own family and their history. The little snippets I knew were fascinating, but I didn't know the whole story. My fourth great grandfather had built a house in Grosse Ile, Michigan in 1875. I was among the seventh generation to be born in Grosse Ile and though I didn't live in that particular house, I was intimately familiar with it, having spent countless hours there with my grandparents and my great grandmother Sylvia who lived there until she died in 2007.
