On 25 December 1806 Albinus Reeves and Lydia Burt, the author's great, great, great grandparents, were married in Gillingham, Dorset. Three days earlier, Albinus had entered into a marriage bond through which he and his bondsman were committed to paying GBP100 in the event of the marriage not going ahead. After viewing the document in the Wiltshire Record Office in the early 1990s, Jay Reeves, another descendant of Albinus, said that: "Holding it in my hands made the hopes and dreams of a young man seem very real to me". This book is about the hopes, dreams and ordinary lives of ordinary people. Yet, although some of the events described in these stories are very ordinary, others are quite extraordinary. Together they form an account of the Reeves family since the late 15th century.