Memories are not like historical records that progress along an uninterrupted time line. They are more like computer games and jigsaw puzzles; they do not continue in straight lines. They move by association; one memory triggers another and so on. In one sense, what you will be reading is an autobiography (my story as I remember it), but it is more than that. It includes a sage of a family, which reaches out six generations and encompasses a cluster of clans, cousins, and significant people who are inseparably intertwined in my recall. Like any work of memory, it is full of biases. It is probably full of factual errors, although I have tried to confirm the accounts that I have narrated from old letters, family trees, stories told over the dinner table, and the memory of others who participated in the events. To say that it is a work of imagination would not be wrong, but it is an imagination that works through the mind's eye and records the images of memory and family lore. This is the first of a number of volumes. It covers the years prior to Hamp and Mary Bibb going to China, their arrival in China and marriage, and the first few years of their missionary life in China. The entire series of Hamp and Mary Bibb biographies goes up to their departure to Hawaii in 1950.
