My interest in family history awoke when I was thirteen. I asked my mother to ask her Uncle Kenneth to write me about my great grandfather George Pitcher. He sent me a detailed reminiscence, which I soon lost and wholly forgot about. Fortunately, my cousin Marcy Ross had a copy of his letter. She sent it to me when I began to do research on the Pitchers in earnest. It was also Marcy (her mother—my Aunt Kay—was born a Pitcher) who retrieved key government documents concerning our twice great grandfather James Pitcher, a Civil War veteran and casualty.  That set me off on the Pitcher quest, and a trip to England with my thirteen-year old son Benji, a quest that is recorded in “A Perambulation of Kent.”  In England, we fortuitously ran into a British woman, Joyce Davis, also doing research in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives, who proved to be a Pitcher cousin. Besides the three other pieces here, devoted to my Thiem ancestors, I plan eventually to add documents, including written and taped reminiscences of my father, John R. Thiem (the subject of the first piece), and my mother, Virginia C.Thiem (nee Pitcher), as well as materials on the Mendelssohn family, of whom my wife Barbara Thiem is a descendant.