Between the Wedding & the War: The Bulloch/Roosevelt Letters: 1854-1860 (The Bulloch Letters) (Volume 2)

Between the Wedding and the War continues the true saga of two families, the northern Roosevelts and the southern Bullochs. For seven years letters flowed between the Bulloch and Roosevelt families capturing a poignant time of upheaval foreshadowed by war. The letters tell of births, deaths, love, religion, and business and follow Martha Bulloch and two of her remaining unwed children North. While stories of family journeys convey the spirit of America’s expansion and growth, stories about the home front reveal two different cultures. In the midst of it all, a president is born.

Born and raised in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of New York State, an area rich in the history of the American Revolution, Gwendolyn Koehler was the daughter of Milton and Lillian (Moody) Roblee. Educated at local schools she graduated from Corning Northside High School, and earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She taught elementary grades in Endicott, NY until her marriage to Arthur Koehler, and their move to Ithaca, New York. Her teaching career continued and she enrolled in the Independent Studies Program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her mentors were Pat Carini of the Prospect School and Archives, Brenda Engle, and George Hein. She graduated with a Master of Arts Degree and continued her extensive career in the field of education in Ithaca, New York until her retirement in 2000 and their move to Georgia. Making their home in Alpharetta Georgia, Gwendolyn found an advertisement in the local paper that caught her interest. Bulloch Hall, the 1839 home of Mittie Bulloch, mother of President Theodore Roosevelt, was looking for Volunteer Docents. She answered the ad, fell in love with the house, the story of the Bulloch/Roosevelt family, and entered her journey into the Southern past. What began as a volunteer opportunity to pursue her love of history evolved into her present position. She is the Education Director of Bulloch Hall, responsible for docents and training, tour development, the research library and archives, and the intern program. She is President of the Advisory Board of the Schools of Geography and Anthropology at Kennesaw University. She works closely with Connie Huddleston, her co-author, authenticating the available information regarding the history of the family and other projects. For the past five years, assisted by interns from various universities, she embarked on an intensive project; authentically interpreting and transcribing hundreds of pages of Bulloch/Roosevelt family letters written during the 19th century. She researched and published a brief history of the house and family which is available in the Bulloch Hall Museum Shop. Mittie and Thee, An 1853 Roosevelt Romance, is the first of three volumes of letters to be published by the co-authors.

Connie Marie (Aldridge) Huddleston loved history and dreamed of writing a book even as a child. In 2015, she will publish her fifth and sixth volumes, all dealing with her first love, our nation's past. Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, on 12 August 1952 to Thomas Kenneth and Lena Carl Carol Aldridge, she grew up entirely in Kentucky where generations of her family have lived from the beginning of the Commonwealth. Connie attended school at McCracken County's Concord and Forestdale Elementary Schools and Heath High School before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, for her junior year at Lafayette High School. She graduated from Anderson County High School in 1970 and then attended the University of Kentucky, graduating in 3.5 years with a degree in Special Education. Connie married 2nd Lt. Charles Vernon Huddleston (U.S. Army) of Madisonville, Kentucky, on 4 February 1973. As a military family, they resided at various times in Germany, Texas, Georgia, California, and Maryland over the next 20 years. Two children joined the family during their first tour in Germany, Amy Cassandra and Charles Adrian. Connie taught middle school in Hinesville, Georgia, and at a Department of Defense School in Pirmasens, Germany, before continuing her education at Frostburg State University (Maryland) and receiving a second bachelor degree. This one is in history with an emphasis on archaeology. Over the next 30 years, she continued to be employed as an archaeologist in Maryland and then Georgia. In 2003, she received her masters' degree in historic preservation from Goucher College, Maryland. In 2005, Connie started her own historic preservation consulting firm, Interpreting Time's Past, LLC, to provide more time for creative writing. Connie's first book, Marshall County (Kentucky) for Arcadia Press, is a pictorial history of her mother's home county. Her second and third books, again pictorial histories, deal with Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps in Georgia and Kentucky. In 2014, Connie published her first fiction volume, written for middle grade readers. Greg's First Adventure in Time deals with a 12 year-old-boys adventure as he accidently time travels 3,000 years into North America's Archaic Period. In 2015, this volume received the Children's Literary Classics Seal of Approval. Greg's Second Adventure in Time will be released on 1 October 2015. For the past few years, Connie has researched Georgia's Bulloch family and is currently working on a biography of James Stephens Bulloch, President Theodore Roosevelt's maternal grandfather. On 14 October 2015, Mittie & Thee: An 1853 Roosevelt Romance will be released by her and her coauthor Gwendolyn Koehler. It is the story of the courtship of Theodore Roosevelt's parents and is not only a collection of never before published, transcribed letters, but a commentary of two antebellum societies. Connie resides in a log cabin near Crab Orchard, Kentucky, with her husband and their Australian Shepherd Katie. They all enjoy the quiet of rural Kentucky.