Six members of the extended Dering family who experienced the Revolutionary War lived ordinary lives which are shared through their letters and diaries. With their own research, the authors bring focus, detail, fact, and new insights into a distant period of American history by making these few individuals accessible through stories from their lives. The reader will laugh with Hepzi, suffer with Thomas, sacrifice with Abigail, mourn with Anna’s mother, weigh options with Sarah, and observe the ridiculous with Charles. Abigail wrote from London before the war and Charles from Paris at its end. Sarah’s and Anna’s stories remind us that British loyalists were not few or strangers but were fathers, husbands, and siblings.