Hudson Valley Reckoning

By Kami Nguyen Eleanor Mire, a lifelong Malden resident, wanted to learn about her family’s past after she watched the Ken Burns documentary series, The Civil War.  “I always point to that because there was so much he put into that that I absolutely didn’t know, and I thought I knew about the Civil War,” Mire said. “That pushed me to start looking into my family and how they related to the Civil War, and that opened the floodgates.” Mire’s ancestors are part of a myriad of individual family histories that have shaped the past, present, and future of the United States. Some stories are waiting to be told, truths yet to be discovered.  In her new book, A Hudson Valley Reckoning, Debra Bruno reckons with her family history of slaveholding and the realities of slavery in northern states. At the center of this story are Mire’s ancestors, who were enslaved in the 1800s by Bruno’s ancestors in upstate New York.  Mire’s great-grandparents on another side of her family moved to Malden in 1906 from Boston. […]