SOME OF THE NEW STORIES INCLUDE:

• The most important ghost story – how Emeline’s letters found Larimer (not the other way around.)

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• The ghost story of Pomp, the young escaped slave who wandered into Jacob’s Union camp in December 1862 near Helena, Arkansas and how two years after the publication of the original edition, Larimer learned Pomp’s name from the Civil War Diary of Reverend Corkhill.

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• The ghost story of the Ice Merchant of Savannah, Georgia who hosted Jacob Ritner for Christmas Dinner in 1864 at the end of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and how Larimer met his great grandson.

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• The story of Jacob Ritner’s aunt Mary Ritner, who ran the boarding house in Chambersburg, PA where the famous abolitionist John Brown lived while planning his raid on Harpers Ferry.

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• The story of Frances “Franc” Roads, one of the founders of the national/international women’s organization P.E.O., who is mentioned in one of Emeline’s letters as a twelve-year old girl who came over one afternoon with her cousin to play with Jacob and Emeline’s daughters.

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• The story of Henry Clay Dean, a lawyer from Mt. Pleasant, Iowa who opposed Emeline’s brother Alvah Bereman in a court case, and then 20 years later had a whole chapter written about him in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

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• The story of Captain Romulus Hanks from Knoxville, Iowa who (non-fiction) shared a hospital room with Jacob in Rome, Georgia, and then in the 1940s had a starring role in the book The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters (historical fiction) that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

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• The strange stories of finding three different Civil War era photo albums that contained pictures of Jacob, Emeline, and their families, including their children and parents.