The Family Silver by Sharon O'Brien

"O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her own family's history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past - her mother's diaries and memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver - into a story of remembrance and redemption. In the lives of her Irish American relatives, she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve created both desire and depression that followed her family through generations, across the sea from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s."--BOOK JACKET.