Edelweiss: An Historical Novel
by Kathryne Ann Kinsey
$15.95 paperback, 154 pages
Published: December 2001
ISBN 1880849-41-0

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Kathryne Ann Kinsey—whose roots in Hood River, Oregon, go back several generations—has written a novel about her family's journey to get here more than a century ago. Part fact, part fiction, Edelweis: An Historical Novel follows the journey of Kinsey's paternal grandmother, Laura Eller Everett, from her childhood in Tuscarawas, Ohio, to a job as a nanny in the industrial city of Youngstown and finally to Hood River in the early part of the 1900s. Her journey in search of a better life that involved many of the hardships other adventurers of that era encountered-poverty, struggle, life, and death. And it was a journey whose ending can be traced to the family plot at Hood River's Idelwilde Cemetery. Only when the author finally saw her grandmother's tombstone in the Kinsey family plot did she realize the real story was not the one she had always believed.

"It was dusk when I saw the graves," says Kinsey today from her home in North Carolina. "Having already done some genealogical work on my family, I knew the bare facts about the lives of the people whose graves I was seeing for the first time. But as I looked around me, I began to realize there was much more to this story . . .. The more I researched, the more convinced I became there was a real story here," said the author, "and I have been blessed to be the one to tell it."