An avid reader, most of the books I consume are fiction but along the way a number of non-fiction tomes get included. Many of those books concentrate on history and I sometimes find facts that connect to my own family's history in surprising places. One of those reads was Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement. It was the pick of a books club I belong to or else I probably wouldn't have read a history of the suffrage movement in the US as the country I live in also has a long and fraught suffrage history of its own and I haven't read any books about that struggle.
Still the US book related an interesting history and one chapter also gave a brief historical outline of the founding of the Dakotas. That added context to an address from which my long lost 2 x great granduncle, Alexander Matheson, wrote to his sister Margaret once he found her again. I'll have to look into that further.
Another recent read related to this family line as well. I knew that Northern Light: The enduring mystery of Tom Thomson and the woman who loved him, would be about my cousin. Various books and articles about Tom Thomson and his mysterious death have added clues to this family history over the years. This latest read spun the theory of an illegitimate child, an interesting addition to the Thomson story which, if true, could perhaps add to my family tree.
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