Among the gifts Boyd Johnson received on his twenty-first birthday was a letter that his grandfather wrote to him sixteen years earlier, shortly before he died. That letter helped complete the picture of a man Boyd barely remembered, and led to a search for more information about his family. What he found are the documents in this book, the words of long-dead ancestors telling a previously lost story. The story begins when ten-year-old Jacob Johnson and his family walked from North Carolina to western Kentucky in 1810, and then follows the family as it migrates in succeeding generations to Tennessee and Missouri and Oregon and Washington and California and finally to Texas where Boyd was born and raised. Here is the story of that 200-year journey in the words of those who were there. A lot happened along the way.