History plus rampant imagination = stories

I've known people who never look back and others who love the dry facts and figures of history.  I love the sense of it, the knowledge that throughout time people were like we are now, yet the setting has changed.  I'm enamored of the tidbits of personal stories passed down through our family.

Once, as we spoke of family history, my Grandma Way told me she remembered her grandmother telling her of traveling in a covered wagon.  My young adult mind was amazed.  I thought she'd then spin a tale as exciting as the movies I'd seen.  She didn't.  In fact that was all she had to say.  For her grandmother it was a simple statement of fact.  That was how they'd traveled.  I wonder will my great great grandchild be amazed I traveled by car?

My maternal grandfather, Elmer Edwin Way, was born in 1894.

  

{He looks quite handsome in his WW1 uniform doesn't he?}

Anyway knowing his birth date altered my paradigm. 

Suddenly real people lived, loved and died in the 1800's.

Of course my imagination kicked in, spun possible stories.

All my historical romances so far,

 The Outlaw of Cedar Ridge

 Seducing the Sheriff 

plus the one I'm working on now 

are set in 1891.