FamilyTales started out as an online archive of letters from a few families but has since expanded to contain letters from many historic figures. The archive contains documents which can be searched by an individual's name, a specific place, or by a given year.

Just Arrived!

The project to unearth the social network that existed around George Washington using letters and their contents to determine who were friends, co-workers or just hangers on has taken it's first big step forward. To put this in a modern day perspective think of our founding fathers getting together and creating their own Facebook accounts.

The next step is apply some classical Social Network Analysis to the relationship data already unearthed. For example revealing sub-groups that might be considered cliques, network density (or density of subgroups), distance between any two nodes(people), prominence of individuals etc etc Hopefully this will provide some new insight on why historic figures may have made given decisions. Read more than you ever wanted to know about Network Analysis Applied to Historic figures in the American Revolution.

Newly Added Historic Letters

I've finished work on a few thousand letters from and to George Washington. Most of the letters were written to G.W. from 'eminent' men of the time. Some of the names you will recognize such as John Jay and Benedict Arnold other names are less recognizable (unless your into such things) - but this doesn't mean they are any less interesting for example Gouverneur Morris

How are you using this site?

Send us an email! (hans.brough@yahoo.com) Whether you are researching a school paper, researching the next great historic novel, putting together a class lesson or just browsing, it is important that we hear what you like, dislike, find hard to use or want more of... It's all part of making the site better. Seriously folks, we really would like to hear how you use the site.

Find out what people were writing about on this day in history