Reviews

★★★★★ The objective of any author should be to hold the reader’s interest. To want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end, and this is what Searching for Charles: The Untold Legacy of an Immigrant’s American Adventure does. Measured in his prose, Stephen Watts …

A Timeless Narrative Author Stephen Watts is a very lucky man. He was fortunate to have access to a treasured collection of family correspondence which had been compiled over several generations. Some documents were in the possession of his father; others were held by other relatives. A larger collection had …

★★★★★ Taking readers on a historic journey across the Atlantic and into the burgeoning American continent, Searching for Charles: The Untold Legacy of an Immigrant’s American Adventure by Stephen Watts is a stunning portrait of the past. In 1835, Charles Watts left the oppressive gloom of Dickensian London in search of a …

Recommended The letters of a 19th-century immigrant and pioneer are transcribed and contextualized by his descendent in this absorbing debut epistolary biography by Watts. Charles Watts was born in Epping, near London, in 1812. Along with family friend William Abrehart, the 23-year-old boarded the Montreal in late 1835 hoping to escape poverty …

All Production Grades: A “I suppose you think I have forgotten you as it is now 9 months since I left you, but this is a large country to ramble thro.” So begins the first letter home from Charles Watts, who left London for the United States in December of …

★★★ Drawing on his letters home, Searching for Charles vivifies a nineteenth-century English immigrant’s new life on the Illinois prairie. Stephen Watts’s family biography Searching for Charles makes use of an ancestor’s correspondence, bringing to life a witness to nineteenth-century American history. Charles Watts was an immigrant to the United States in the 1830s. …

★★★ A celebration of an “ordinary” working-class immigrant who journeyed from Britain to build a new life in America offers a window into 19th-Century prairie pioneer living. SEARCHING FOR CHARLES (The Untold Legacy of an Immigrant’s American Adventure) unravels the legacy of Charles Watts, a lawyer’s clerk who set sail …

In this detail-rich account of his family history, Stephen Watts shares what he has learned, but perhaps just as importantly, how he has learned it, about his great-great-grandfather Charles, the man responsible for bringing the Watts family to America. In December 1835, 23-year-old Charles left England for America, arriving in …