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A Searcy Family History · The Trilogy

I Am Coming

three volumes · five centuries · one line of daughters

From a dissolved priory in Tudor Hertfordshire to a red-clay ridge in north Mississippi — the documented story of one family, carried down the generations by the people who kept it.

The title is a letter. In the winter of 1713, a woman in Hertfordshire wrote three words across the Atlantic to the man waiting for her in Charleston — I am coming — and got on the ship.

What follows her is more than a hundred and thirty ancestors and five hundred years, written not as a family tree but as a story — evidence first, invention never, every scene tied to a record a stranger could check. Three volumes carry the line from the Old World to the Deep South, each anchored on a woman who kept the family when the men moved or marched or died: Barbara, who crossed an ocean; Mary Baker, who held a household through a revolution; and Mary Jane, who held one farm through a war and a widowhood and forty more years besides. The synopses below tell each volume's story.

Now on Spotify

Listen — the podcast of the trilogy

Hear the story told aloud. The I Am Coming podcast brings the trilogy to Spotify — press play below, or open the show to follow every episode.

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All three volumes · complete

Read the written volumes

The full trilogy — about 230,000 words of narrative across three volumes, with another 73,000 words of working bibliography and chapter-by-chapter sources memos standing behind every scene. Read it in the browser, or take it with you.

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Chapter by chapter

All 36 pieces, one page each, with reading nav. Searchable and linkable — send a cousin straight to the chapter they're in.

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The Complete Trilogy

Fixed pages and stable page numbers, so a citation points at the same place forever. ~2.8 MB.

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The Complete Trilogy

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I

Volume One

England

1490 to 1714

6 chapters

In the 1490s a Derbyshire younger son named James Nedham walked south to the Tudor court and rose to become Henry VIII's Surveyor of the King's Works — the man who built the king's palaces at Hampton Court, Whitehall, and Windsor, and who was given, in 1538, a dissolved Augustinian priory in north Hertfordshire that his family would hold for nearly two hundred years.

Volume I is the story of that house and the eight generations who lived in it, through a civil war, a regicide, the Great Plague and the Great Fire — and of the long detective work that finally recovered the woman at the end of the line. A 1925 book had given her a father who never existed; the records gave her back her true parents, and gave the family a name it had lost for two hundred years. It closes in February 1714 on a wooden dock in Charleston, with a twenty-eight-year-old woman stepping off a ship she had boarded against the advice of everyone she loved — including the man waiting for her on the dock.

Chapters The Surveyor's Priory · Signing the Pedigree · Eustace's War · George Senior and the Restoration World · I Am Coming · Two Letters Crossing

Read Volume I →

II

Volume Two

Virginia & Carolina

1742 to 1794

6 chapters

The line comes ashore and pushes inland. In 1742, on the Virginia south-side frontier at Lunenburg, a Carolina colonel's daughter named Mary Baker marries into the family and gives it a name that will travel for generations. Two lifetimes on, that name comes to rest in her granddaughter and namesake, Mary Baker DeGraffenreid — a girl raised at the edge of a war that takes her older brother, Vincent, off to the Revolution and the fighting at Brandywine, Stony Point, Guilford, and Yorktown.

Volume II is a book about the ones who stay and keep the household while the men march — and about a fifteen-year-old at a writing-desk on a November night in 1779 who comes to the foot of a letter and sets down two words she then copies into the book that stays in the house: we continue. It becomes the family's quiet creed, and it carries the story out of Virginia and toward the far dirt of the west.

Chapters Lunenburg, Summer 1742 · The Child at Lunenburg · The War in the House · The Wedding Morning · Vincent's War · The Keeping

Read Volume II →

III

Volume Three

She Held the Line

Mississippi · 1832 to 1920

9 chapters

On the last morning of October 1850, a girl of not-quite-eighteen named Mary Jane Rorie stood at a loom in her father's house on a cleared ridge in north Mississippi while the census-taker came up the road to write her down. Volume III is her whole life — from that loom to a farm in the red-clay corner where Tishomingo County becomes Alcorn, through a war that took her brothers (one of them killed with the 32nd Mississippi at Atlanta), a widowhood in which she took up the farm herself and held it, and the long outliving of nearly everyone she began with.

She stayed on one piece of ground while the world rearranged itself around her — county lines redrawn, sons scattering, a household built and kept — until 1920. It is the story of the one who doesn't move, the keeper; and it does not look away from the people the record names alongside the enslaved people it could not.

"The State of Mississippi made one paper of her, and the family had carried the truth of her the whole way without it."

Chapters The Man With the Book · The Town That Came Out of the Woods · Twenty-Five · The Brothers' War · The Widow Takes the Farm · Miss M. J. Rorie · Three Sons · Taken In · Closing Image

Read Volume III →

About these books

The trilogy is written under the same discipline as everything in this project: the machine can reach further and faster, but a fact isn't a fact until a human has tied it to a source a stranger could check. Where the record is silent, the books say so and invent nothing to fill it. Each volume carries its own chapter-by-chapter sources memos behind the narrative.

All three volumes are complete and free to read here. A podcast of the trilogy is now on Spotify — you can listen above — with further volumes added as they're recorded. New chapters and volumes are posted here first.

The apparatus is published alongside the narrative: the note on sources, the working bibliography for Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III, and the chapter sources memos for Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III. Every scene traces back through them to a record you can check yourself.

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