This gripping fact-based fictional account, composed of three personal journals written as if by Collins’ ancestors nearly two hundred years ago, contains their intimate, emotional stories, firsthand experiences, and traditions of old-world craftsmanship in a world being overtaken by technology.

Based on the legacies of two Boston Irish and Italian families, it is a perfect story for fans of historical Irish fiction by authors like Jean Grainger, Andrew Wareham, and Daisy O’Shea, fans of historical Italian fiction by Daniela Sacerdoti and Kate Quinn, and fans of historical biographical fiction and family sagas by writers like Mark Sullivan and Marie Benedict.

Forgotten by Time, Rediscovered by Fate

“A century after her birth, Jessie (Ambrosini) Collins is laid to rest beside her husband, Joseph Cornelius Collins, in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Milford, Massachusetts. Weeks later, while settling her estate, her children and grandchildren discover an old hope chest filled with the artifacts and memories of her life.

Among the curiosities and treasures is a tied bundle containing three handwritten journals, previously unknown to the family. In time, they would come to realize that what they held in their hands was the family legacy—pictures of life passed down by those who lived before—of how it was with them in their time.”

The Odyssey of Cornelius Collins

It is 1845 the first year of the Great Famine in Ireland when fourteen-year-old Cornelius Collins begins a harrowing seven-year struggle for survival. At twenty, he escapes to Liverpool, England, securing a one-way third-class passage aboard a “coffin ship” bound for America. Against all odds, he survives the forty-one-day Atlantic crossing on the packet ship Clara Wheeler, landing in Boston, Massachusetts.

There, he is processed and released into the streets alone to face the “land sharks” eager to take what little he possesses, including his life. Fate intervenes, and an Irish American welfare society helps him find work as a bootmaker in the town of Milford. Determined, Cornelius vows to save every penny and send it back to Ireland to support his family.

Of Leather & Stone

As the decades pass, a highly prized pink granite is discovered in Milford triggering a “granite rush” attracting skilled stonecutters from around the world, including Giuseppe Ambrosini, a master stonecutter from Lombardy, Italy, a region renowned for its stone craftsmen. He comes to America seeking his fortune in the pink granite quarries of Milford.

Generations of their two families live through the most radical shift in industrial technology in the history of civilization, the disastrous effects of the American Civil War, widespread labor upheavals, the total collapse of the American economy, and the Irish Rebellion.

These events profoundly affect them and their American-born children, who unite their two families in marriage in the aftermath of ‘the war to end all war.’

The Remembering

“Theirs is the common fate of common people: living their lives without fanfare, known only to those who worked with them and those who loved them, then forgotten by time—until one day, when they are remembered, and their names are spoken again by the living in THE REMEMBERING.“