Imagine a young man in Ohio quitting his good job with a newspaper, leaving his two young children and his pregnant wife, to answer his nation's call to go off to war and save the Union. And imagine his younger brother who had already enlisted a year earlier but was fighting for the Confederacy! Then imagine their father fifty years before, a child trying to get by on the streets of Baltimore, who in a different war is taken aboard a privateer as her powder monkey. Finally, imagine that these were not fictional characters but were in fact the author's ancestors whose stories of valor in America's wars, along with generous doses of truth-stretching, came down through the generations.