Ancestors’ First Homes, Jobs, and Communities

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Step inside the early lives that shaped your family’s story.

Blacksmith shop
Jesse Hoover's blacksmith shop at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site
by Chris Light at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Once immigrants settled in their new country, state, or territory, they created homes, found work, built communities, and not necessarily in that order. Poetry allows us to step into those early first spaces, as we imagine their kitchens, workshops, streets, and new friendships.

📚 Poems and books inspired by first homes & communities

NOTE: Books are affiliate links with BooksAMillion. You don't pay any more for the book, but I receive a commission for sending you to their site. Much appreciated!

  • Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems: Chicago Poems (1916) brought Carl Sandburg to national attention, and it remains one of the most widely known volumes of American poetry.

  • Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century by Erika Desimone and Fidel Louis: Enslaved humans were only part of the colonization story. There were also freeborn Blacks (one of my ancestors), self-liberated individuals, and those folks born in the years after the Emancipation. African Americans had, and still have, a rich cultural heritage all their own, a heritage largely subsumed in popular history and collective memory by the atrocity of enslavement.

  • The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee.

  • Naomi Shihab Nye’s Red Suitcase collection.

🖋️Poetry Form Spotlight: Triolet

A triolet is an eight-line poem with two lines repeated in a pattern (ABaAabAB).

Yes, it's fall, but here's a fresh triolet example:

A triolet
Sadakichi Hartmann 1867 – 1944 (public domain)

’Tis the first day of Spring!
The catkins are a-bloom,
The bluebirds are a-wing,
’Tis the first day of Spring!
Faint scents the breezes bring;
Man’s thoughts new shape assume.
’Tis the first day of Spring,
The catkins are a-bloom!

Note the use of (mostly) common language throughout, which makes it easier to come up with words that rhyme.

✅ Checklist

☐ Select one aspect of your ancestor’s early life: home, job, or community
☐ Capture routines, sights, and sounds
☐ Include specific details: tools, streets, shops, neighbors
☐ Experiment with the triolet’s repeating lines
☐ End with a line honoring endurance and legacy

✍️Mini-Prompt

Write a triolet about a single day in your ancestor’s first home or job. Focus on repetition and a single moment. Focus on what he or she might have been feeling, seeing, and hearing.

💬 Call to action

Compile all four poems from this article and the previous three articles into a digital booklet or blog series.

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