Author Faith McClung Kline O'Brien's paternal grandparents, Albert McClung and Mattie Fitzgerald, met at a small, country church in Oklahoma in 1907, the year that territory became a state. Albert's ancestors included Revolutionary patriots "Saucy Jack" McClung, of Scotch-Irish descent, and Abraham Kuykendall, of Dutch lineage, who, around 1740, relocated from New York to North Carolina, where he settled and accumulated a fortune in gold coins. Mattie descended from two former sea captains who became merchants in Brooklyn, New York-Edward Card from Maine and Nathaniel Grafton from Newport, Rhode Island, whose seafaring ancestors had sailed the Atlantic Ocean since the mid-1600s.
In Move On! O'Brien chronicles her extended family's history, with each chapter focusing on one of Albert's or Mattie's seventeen ancestral branches-the Fitzgerald and McClung Clans and their allied lines: the Anthony, Barry, Card, Dods, Forman, Grafton, Kuykendall, Longstreet, Miller, Reid, Thompson, Tidwell, Trigg, Wilbore, and Wyckoff families. Ten of these lines include Revolutionary patriots, and ten have roots in America extending as far back as the 1600s. Move On! tells how descendants of these disparate families met, united in marriage, and eventually became pioneers on the Southwestern prairies.
Glimpses of religion in the lives of everyday Americans appear throughout Move On!, which combines genealogical details with personal stories, many taking place during pivotal events in US history.
Stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries told firsthand by O'Brien's late grandparents help bring Move On! to life through the eyes of real-life characters, her ancestors.
