Feature / 26 October 2026 / 6 minute read
Read →I Want to Know the Leaves
My great-grandmother deserves better than a name on a family tree. I want to understand the people between the names and dates, and leave something of my own story behind.
The WirePresented by HIM
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Filed under
Family History
Writing and visual commentary connected to this thread.
15 entries
Feature / 24 October 2026 / 4 minute read
Read →Six Years Later in Bosque County
Two voting photographs, six years apart, open a family history of Clifton, Lakeside Village, and the rooms where we learned to belong.
24 October 2026 / 4 minute read
Read →Reading Daniel Perry Beyond the Obituary
A flattering tribute leaves difficult questions about arrival dates, slavery, and what a family history owes its subjects.
Feature / 16 October 2026 / 5 minute read
Read →I went to France to escape Texas. Texas packed a bag.
A presidential sex scandal, a mountain commune, spectacularly wrong shoes, and the family visit that brought two worlds to the same dinner table.
Feature / 9 October 2026 / 7 minute read
Read →The Faces We Keep
A day at the scanner becomes a Birdwell family album: Ivana Sue, Papa Birdwell, Big Mama, and the lives that still shape ours.
Feature / 3 October 2026 / 8 minute read
Read →Clifton, Rain or Shine
A rainy return to Clifton, Texas: childhood field trips, family roots, Olaf’s, and the people keeping a town’s cultural life going.
Feature / 19 September 2026 / 12 minute read
Read →God Forbid We Just Go to the Butcher.
An errand with my mother became a journey through the Hill County landscape that keeps giving our family pieces of itself.
30 August 2026 / 9 minute read
Read →Apparently, I’m Unsupervised Now.
Boarding school, invisible fatherhood and what happens when a girl dad is left alone with modern technology.
16 August 2026 / retrospective
Read →Fourteen, Apparently.
A number crosses generations and refuses to behave like a coincidence.
9 August 2026 / retrospective
Read →The Work Nobody Sees.
A restored portrait, a DNA cluster and the patient labor between them.
2 August 2026 / retrospective
Read →How a Family Becomes an Archive.
An heirloom becomes evidence when the story stops floating loose from the object.
26 July 2026 / retrospective
Read →The Photograph Is Evidence.
Restore the damage. Preserve the people. Leave uncertainty visible.
19 July 2026 / retrospective
Read →Distance Is an Operating Expense.
Seventeen miles to school is not atmosphere. It is the architecture of a childhood.
12 July 2026 / retrospective
Read →The Library at the End of the Highway.
Highway 6, the Brazos and the institutions that keep a family trail legible.
5 July 2026 / retrospective
Read →Independence Requires Maintenance.
Two hundred fifty years later, freedom remains both inheritance and unfinished work.