Creating Fiction from History: December 1, 2021

Understandably, Charlotte was proud to wear her new dress for the nice man holding the camera. It was her birthday trip after all!

She and her parents, Russian immigrants Andrei and Alina Semenov, moved to Chicago from Kazan, Russia. They had begun homesteading a small parcel of land just west of the big city about three years previous. Charlotte was used to hardship, so when she stepped onto the boat headed east, down the Volga to the North Sea, she was prepared for the long, arduous journey, even though she was not quite 10 years old.

When they finally landed, several months later, on the sh...