U.S. Marine Robert B. Tracy was a machine gunner in Company E, 9th Regiment, 3rd Marine Division during World War II. Having fought on Bougainville, Guam and Iwo Jima he survived all battles in the Pacific Theater of the war. Through his surviving letters gives the reader a glimpse of the hardships this Marine experienced, the battles he fought and finally his eventual outcome.

The Life stories of David John Campbell Ireland of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders; David Watson Howat of the Seaforth Highlanders; James Clark of the 1st Black Watch and John Pake of the 14th Black Watch who served and died in the First World War.

There is a small city located on Sturgeon Bay which flows directly into Lake Michigan through a large shipping canal. The city of Sturgeon Bay offers one of the few places in the world that one can go from deep fresh water fishing to inland lake fishing without ever leaving your boat. On the shores of the bay sat a small private resort named "De Jonge's on the Bay," in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. For three young children of Barney and Donna Tracy this resort in Door County, Wisconsin would offer countless summer joys of fishing, swimming, boating and playing during the 1970s and 1980s....

On Monday, 4 March 1839 in the library of the University of St. Andrews at St. Andrews, Fife, there occurred a unique meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of St. Andrews in which members of the Buist and Goodsir families were in attendance. The members of the Buist family whose interests included geology and mineralogy met members of the Goodsir family who were distinguished surgeons of Anstruther and Largo and whose interests embraced anatomy, zoology, natural and human history. The two prominent Fife families where linked by the marriage of George Buist (1750-1797) a tenant...

"On Monday, the 11th inst., were deposited in the Dean Cemetery, of Edinburgh, the mortal remains of perhaps the most accomplished anatomist and the most successful teacher of his time. This language cannot be deemed too strong for John Goodsir. By the distinguished colleagues who were the pall-bearers at the mournful ceremony, by the numerous private friends, and by the 200 pupils of the present and past years; who followed their associate and master to his final resting place, it will be reckoned as but inadequately descriptive. The profession and the scientific world at large can...

Two centuries ago Dr. John Goodsir was among the best known men in the East Neuk of Fife. According to the Glasgow Herald Newspaper dated Saturday, 26 December 1868: "Dr. John Goodsir was a well-known and popular man. 'The customs of the period' in which he lived were primitive and curious, and the practice of the healing art in rural district was carried on in pack-saddle fashion and regularity. Dr. Goodsir would start from Largo on Monday, caparisoned for the week with drugs and surgical appliances and not return home till Friday as itinerant with his physic as the ancient Peripatetic with...

The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing was unveiled on 1 August 1932 and the pilgrimage to the Somme battlefields of France would be different this time. Generations to come would remember the Somme and would make much of this memorial to the dead. But on this day, and in this crowd, all minds were focused on but a single thought; of that name, that face, that voice which had once been dear to them and now was lost forever. This is just one commemoration of the life of Private David John Campbell Ireland of the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders who fell here at the Somme on...

Known as the Diggers, the men of the 5th Australian Division had been in their trenches most of that clear summer's day of Wednesday, 19 July 1916. They had only arrived in France a few weeks earlier, some raw recruits like a young 18 year old named Roy Frederick Heard of Ryde, New South Wales, Australia. The Diggers were now preparing themselves to go over the top when that whistle blew. The intense fear they must have felt in those minutes before the sound of that dreaded whistle, one can only now imagine 100 years after that day. But on that summer's day in July of 1916 they did their...

James Patrick Tracy was a Chicago contractor and builder by trade. He would build the steeple for Holy Family Church which is located at 1080 West Roosevelt Road after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It would be one of Tracy's greatest building achievements and he would himself place the cross in position onto of the steeple which still stands today. James Tracy went out west to Atchison, Kansas and helped build the small rural town into a city for the railroad industry during the early 1880s. The Tracy family relocated back to Chicago, Illinois by 1889. This then is the narrative of the life...