Searching for Ichabod: His Eighteenth-Century Diary Leads Me Home

The narrative knits thirty years of historical and family research into the seams of a contemporary journey of discovery. Ichabod is missing. The author sets out to solve the mystery of his disappearance two hundred years ago. Unconventional methods unearth his diary. A farmer, medical practitioner, shoemaker, and religious liberal, Ichabod Foster survived two wars with Great Britain, participated in the birth of Vermont, and migrated to the Holland Purchase lands of western New York when he was seventy-one years old. In a cramped, snow-covered log cabin beside the dead bodies of his son, brother, and sister-in-law, Ichabod took his last breath January 1, 1813. In her quest to find Ichabod’s grave, Van Camp digs beneath primary source materials to uncover universal themes of death, birth, religion, survival, and war. People she bumps into while traveling through Rhode Island, Vermont, and New York reinforce her sixth-sense encounters.