A few years ago, I came across letters that my late great-uncle Edward wrote to my mother, beautiful recollections of growing up on the West Side of Chicago in the early part of last century. He told of riding trains when “locomotive was steam and spat out tiny cinders” and “the early darkness of a winter night, 
when falling snow gleamed in the street light, blanketing the homely street and insulating the clomp of a passing horse wagon.” He wrote about my great-grandmother from Ireland, who’d raised him and wondered about “this Irish farm girl who worked her fingers to the bone as a boarding house keeper to give the little family a start in America.”
I began to wonder about her, too. His descriptions set a story going in me which I moved to Connecticut, to the 1853 Governor’s mansion I bought in 2012 with my husband.
Edward Callaghan’s precise passages about what it was like to be a boy buying penny candy and riding ice-wagons, inspired my character Vincent to whom I gave his birthdate: January 23, 1909. Without those letters, The Latecomers might not be a book.