“Butler was already firing on Drewry’s Bluff a few miles from Richmond, and the cannon balls were falling in every direction.”

A converted miner’s cottage within Dartmoor National Park in south-west England is an unlikely spot to find a huge cache of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginian letters, diaries, and photographs, but nevertheless they have found their way there—to the county from where the Mayflower set sail in 1620. The bulk of the collection consists of nearly four decades of correspondence (from 1928 to 1966) between my mother in England and grandmother in Virginia, but there are also bundles of family letters, diaries, and two suitcases from which black and white photographs spill out in chaotic disorder. All this because my mother, a Richmonder, moved to London following her marriage to an Englishman in 1936 and subsequently lived for nearly forty years in Devon.