Use your library or the Internet to find out more. This square is from an 1853 Shaker religious greeting that was hand-painted in watercolor. You can view it in the Library of Congress' American Memory Collection on the World Wide Web. Doing Teresa's diary was a great deal of fun. First, I wanted to put in as much humor as possible.
History often reads as a hard and grim experience.
But people are remarkably resilient and funny, even when the going is very hard. Finally, I tried to mentally take this trip with Teresa. This is a very different approach from what I do with my nonfiction. With nonfiction, I've done my research and know the sequence of events from start to finish before I put a word on paper. Your mother's ancestors came to America from Sicily as the Viscardi family did.