All Our Yesterdays: A Century of Family Life in an American Small Town
by By Robertson, James Oliver and Robertson, Janet C.
Category: History , United States , General

A little over twenty-five years ago, James and Janet Robertson, a young couple with two children, bought an eighteenth-century house in Hampton, a small town in northeastern Connecticut. For more than one hundred and fifty years this beautiful, characteristic New England structure had been home to an unusually accumulative family named Taintor, who saved a vast quantity of papers - personal and business letters; accounts of travel; newspapers and other periodicals; bills and business files; books and pamphlets; visiting cards, invitations, and playbills; college catalogues and notes and class speeches.Drawing on the remarkable riches of the Taintor collection, the Robertsons record the experiences of the family since the 1790s. Two young couples, the brothers Roger and Solomon Taintor and their wives, the sisters Abigail and Judith (nee Bulkeley), were the first of the family to live in the house. Harmoniously occupying it together, they established themselves among the town's leading citizens; as merchants and livestock dealers, they soon began to participate in local politics and eventually moved some of their capital into out-of-town industrial and financial ventures. Their sons, cousins raised in the house like brothers, in time enrolled at Yale, reporting from there in astonishingly frank letters on student riots and girl-chasing but also seriously reflecting on their studies and travels, future careers, and the rituals of courtship. The surprisingly varied lives of the Taintor women, too, are vividly and candidly revealed in their expressive correspondence and other personal documents. As the generations pass, we come to know intimately - in their own words as amplified by the Robertsons' thoughtfully informed narrative - these feisty, frugal Yankees who created their share of the uniquely American economy, fought to preserve the Union, and finally entered the modern world still maintaining the small-town values that continue to this day to shape our national life as a guiding mythology.All Our Yesterdays takes us back into the very midst of the daily life that would become the model of our country's perception of itself, into the reality of the past as it was actually lived - births and deaths, gossip and scandal, triumphs and reversals at work and at home; attitudes toward sex, love, and marriage; the local reverberations of great national political events and wars. "It was a wonderful serendipity that connected us to such a treasure trove," the Robertsons write, and in All Our Yesterdays they brilliantly share their good fortune with the rest of us.