The Book in the Attic

In 1951 a retired Port Huron paper executive named Edgar Weber Kiefer finished a book he had been working on for twenty-five years. Most of it he drafted in a single month, aboard a ship crossing the Mediterranean. He called it The Kiefer Saga.

Edgar was the eldest grandson of Dr. Herman Kiefer. He had grown up listening to the old doctor's stories, and he had watched the family scatter — to Grand Rapids and Chicago, to New York and Paris, to China and Sweden. He wanted it all in one place before the people who remembered were gone.

On the title page he put the family motto: Thue recht und scheue niemand — Do right and fear no one. He dedicated the book "to my mother, that pioneer woman, who was a better Kiefer than any of them."

And at the back he did something remarkable. He left blank pages.

"It is hoped that each family will keep its own record so that another volume can be added in fifty or a hundred years."

He even printed everyone's address, "in case present members wish to communicate with each other."

Seventy-five years later, a copy surfaced in the genealogy collection of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jim Blackburn — a great-great-great-grandson of Dr. Kiefer — read every page.

This website is the next volume Edgar asked for.