Rooms Without Doors

Sometime after this, two of my children came home from school and said that their homework involved the tracing of their ancestral lineage to the farthest point. This set off my intellectual machine into forward drive. I knew all my ancestors back to the fourth generation, but with their requests, I wanted to go much further. I knew that my great-grandmother’s maiden name was Barrett, and I always like to read poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so I went to my library and looked her up bu...