Peter H. Judd

The Akeing Heart is my most recent book, and has a special place for me in that the richness and diversity of the letters and journals that I found that to the creation of a fascinating story. In recent years. I’ve done a number of books concerned with my forebears reaching back to the seventeenth century and centering on New England and on the New York city where I now live. I’ve written these two include the context of the times and wherever possible to use original letters and documents. The see a list of these below, but I want to say a few words here about Akeing. Visit my website if you’d like to find more about the variety of things I’ve done in a long life, my love of music and of walking in the city, and among mountains. http.//www.peterhjudd.com/

The title of The Akeing Heart came to me while searching through poetry anthologies. From William Blake’s long poem, The Mental Traveler, the phrase jumped out in its original spelling. How better to sum up the feelings of these three women as they experienced friendship, mutual affection, sexual attraction, jealousy and conflicts of loyalty. I wove the story in this book using the letters, journals, notes and images that I found in my cousin Elizabeth Wade White’s papers after her death in 1994. In the 1930s as a young woman, she became a friend of the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland. Their letters are full of insight and spirit, as they encouraged the young American. The three shared interests in left-wing politics, botany, and literature, compatibility ended when Elizabeth and Valentine became lovers, painful for Sylvia, conflicted loyalties for Valentine, and frustration for Elizabeth. I knew about this relationship from Sylvia’s biography and her published journals, but here were papers that described what it may have been like at the time and revealed Elizabeth in her own right. I first thought of making a scholarly edition of the letters, but the story was so compelling that I combined the transcribed letters (complete and with original spelling and punctuation) with a narrative. Elizabeth had saved everything, little notes that had passed between the two women, plant leaves that commemorated Journal entries, menus, telegrams. I wanted to convey this fascinating detail. I trust readers will be fascinated as I have been by the eloquent words of the spirited and knowledgeable women. They are writing in the midst of the mid-twentieth century crisis of politics and war. Several readers told me they began to think and talk about the characters as if they knew them.

Some years ago I assembled family letters that told the story of a family who lived from the heyday of industrial Connecticut in the 19th century through to its decline after World War II. I enjoy the experience of having a tale told in the words of the protagonist with the context-setting and -shaping I provide. The Akeing Heart is a riveting story, and I want others to share the characters’ passions and perceptions.

My The Hatch and Brood of Time: Five Phelps Families in the North Atlantic World, 1730–1880, was published by the Newbury Street Press. Boston in 1999; it received the Year 2000 award for Family History from the Connecticut Society of Genealogists and in 2001 it was awarded the Donald Lines Jacobus Award by the American Society of Genealogists. His More Lasting than Brass: a Thread of Family from Revolutionary New York to Industrial Connecticut was published in fall 2004 by the Northeastern University Press and it received the grand prize in genealogy from the Connecticut Society in 2005. It includes extensive accounts of Haring and Clark forebears in the American Revolution and the War of 1812 and an account of the White, Griggs, and Judd families in 19th and 20th century Waterbury. In 2008 he published a three volume account of the direct paternal and maternal ancestries of his four grandparents, Four American Ancestries: White, Griggs, Cowles, Judd, including Haring, Phelps, Denison, Clark, Foote, Coley, Haight, Ayers, and related families. This work includes a fourteen-generation Ahmentafel that lists each name in the direct paternal and maternal lines from the first arrival in America to the present. Using records and journal articles, he identified well over three quarters of the potential individuals in these lines. While less detailed than the previous books, Four American Ancestries includes extensive historical material to provide context for early residents of Hartford, New London, New Haven, Norwich, Fairfield and Fairfield County, and other places in Connecticut and Massachusetts and the smaller number of descendants of immigrants who arrived in New York and Pennsylvania. In 2009 he published the paperback edition of his Affection: Ninety Years of Family Letters, 1850s-1930s: Haring, White, Griggs, Judd Families of New York and Waterbury, Connecticut in two volumes and the next year the Connecticut Genealogical Society gave it its Literary Awards Contest Prize for Family History. He summed up his approach to using historical context in genealogy in “Adding Muscle and Sinew: Spicing up a Family Narrative.” in the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly. March 2008.