It was a writer’s dream. These stories bring you into the lives of working families who depended on the sea.”

Cynthia Elder

When her husband’s parents died several years ago, Cynthia Elder’s family commenced the ritual of sorting through their belongings, which offered a unique family heirloom: letters, journals, documents, and ships’ logs chronicling the lives of Elder family ancestors from the mid-1800s through the Civil War. The discovery shone a light on several ordinary New England families whose coastal lives unfolded on and near the sea. As a writer, Elder set on the path of telling their stories.

“The Journey Begins” and "The Drumbeat of War” comprise Elder’s two-book “Tales of the Sea” series, which tells the true stories of the Fish and Jenkins families and their relatives, friends, neighbors, and the working people of West Barnstable, Mass. Spanning the years 1830 to 1870, the books follow merchant seafarers on their commercial voyages, the Northern soldiers who fought in the Civil War, and those who stayed behind.

Elder is a Barrington resident, sailor, poet, writer, nonprofit leader and communications professional with a deep love of history, exploration, and unfamiliar places. The family stories were a jackpot of riches, a look back to a time when ordinary working peoples’ lives were often eclipsed by those of famous seafaring captains, barons of industry, and other notable figures of their era.

“It was a writer’s dream,” said Elder of the family letters and documents. “These stories bring you into the lives of working families who depended on the sea. It doesn’t focus as much on the great leaders and power brokers of the time, nor on a sensationalized plot. It just tells the truth of the people’s lives — a family and a community.”

In the mid-1800s, formal education didn’t extend much beyond age 12 for working-class children — especially girls. But the Jenkins and Fish families, the central families in the stories, ensured that their children grew up as literate readers and writers. As the men chronicle sea life, the women reveal domestic life, ingenuity, self-sufficiency, courage, and skill. Women like Ruth Fish Jenkins, who joined their husbands at sea, added to the chronicles of sea life’s dangers, doldrums and delights.

First-person accounts are central to the stories, but Elder’s dialogue, narrative, and context are culled through extensive research in libraries, historical societies, nonfiction books, church records, genealogy, newspaper accounts, and historians themselves.

“The Journey Begins” introduces the West Barnstable families and their community, including Joseph Nickerson, keeper of the Sandy Neck Lighthouse and a keeper of stories. The Fish patriarch, Josiah Fish, is a ship’s captain and father of Ruth; George Jenkins is a farmer; his son James eventually marries Ruth. The Jenkins and Fish siblings’ writings add to the narrative.

In “The Drumbeat of War,” James and Ruth set sail together on the Hoogly with their daughter to avoid separation as the country spirals toward the Civil War. Ruth’s brother joins the Union Army; her father begins to suffer from mental illness.

Elder said the written narratives of ship life were not always interesting or well written; they could be tedious and boring.

“But I wanted to give the reader a sense of what it’s like to be stuck at sea in doldrums or endless headwinds,” said Elder.

Ruth and James’ letters and papers revealed their life details. But little was known about lighthouse keeper Joseph Nickerson. So Elder stitched his character together through research on lighthouse keeping — and lighthouse keepers — of the era.

“He became a person who did not travel, but people came to him and shared their stories, he read voraciously, and he had opinions,” said Elder. “I found him to be the perfect counterpoint to those whose lives kept pushing into the distance.”

The most painful letters in the trove were those shared in “The Drumbeat of War,” from the Civil War battlefield, said Elder.

In the trove of family documents, there was an outlier document that is now the focus of a project Elder is working on in collaboration with the Roger Williams University history department, as well as the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. It is a a first-person account by Thomas White, a cook aboard the Hoogly, who was apparently illiterate but dictated his harrowing story of escape from slavery into a life of freedom.

The manuscript, referenced recently in Smithsonian Magazine, is now being analyzed by students; one goal of the research is to seek out Thomas White’s descendants.

“Those who were caught up in the web of slavery often don’t have access to their own histories,” she said. “So it’s important that we trace through the records to find his history.”

Could the Thomas White story become “Book Three” in the series? Perhaps — it’s too soon to say.

“It’s as if my first two books have given birth to a baby,” said Elder.

“Thomas White‘s story will certainly be the subject of an upcoming book, but the book will not be by me alone. The research team that we have assembled will work toward a non-fiction presentation of Thomases complete story.”