In this portion of a longer memoir that examines my connections to the lives of lineal ancestors in sixteenth-century northern Germany, I draw on historical events to imagine what life would have been like for the daughter of a ferryman ancestor named Edde Feerman. Records of the time primarily document the lives of the region’s land-owning men, like those of Edde and his two sons. Still, it is likely that Edde also had a daughter, and in this section of my memoir, i tell her story—and speculate on its residue in my twenty-firstcentury life.

Karen Marguerite Moloney, Clifton H. Jolley