The Gunns
in America
In 1635, Jasper Gunn crossed the Atlantic, beginning the American chapter of a family story that now spans four centuries. Through individual lives, documents, places, and recorded voices, The Gunns in America connects one extended family to the larger currents of American history.
Featured Stories
From the ArchivesJasper Gunn Arrives in New England
A young man leaves England for an uncertain shore — what brought him, what he found, and how he put down roots that would hold for centuries.
Read the story →Understanding Colonial Medicine in Jasper Gunn's World
How a Seventeenth-Century Physician Practiced in Early New England
Read the story →A Little Wayfarer
A five-year-old girl watches a wandering man and his small son from her grandmother's window — and decides, quietly, to do something about it.
Read the story →An Interesting Piano
Told in the voice of the piano itself, three great-granddaughters recall the Boston square grand Aaron Gunn bought for his wife Nancy — and the thread that ties it to Emily Dickinson.
Read the story →The Diary of Lizzie Gunn
A six-week journey east in 1867 — from Illinois to the ancestral Gunn homestead at Montague, Massachusetts, and on to kin in Ohio and Indiana — kept in the hand of twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth "Lizzie" Gunn.
Read the story →Family
Recollections
The Gunn family in its own voices — memories, stories, and firsthand accounts, contributed by descendants and kin and kept here for the ones who come after.
Share Your RecollectionsThis is where the family speaks.
No recollections have been added yet. If you carry a memory, a story, or a relative's own words, you can be the first to set it down here.
The Gunns in America
A 400-Year American Story Told Through One Family Line
The book at the heart of this project: from Jasper Gunn's arrival in 1635 to the present day, one family followed as a lens on four centuries of American life. This site is its companion — the book is the story it was built around.