“An American Family” is about the Warner family of Philadelphia’s Blockley Township. R. David Warner Sr., the author, is qualified to write this book because he and his father are the twelfth and thirteenth generation of a family which settled on the shores of the Schuylkill River five years before William Penn laid out the city. Before his death in 1992, the author’s father wrote a series of letters containing the stories told to him as a child in the early twentieth century. He researched the public records of both the Historical Societies and the Quaker Meetinghouse to build upon the actual accounts of his family members. He spent the last twenty years of his life collecting this historical information.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the author’s great-grandfather began building on the names and facts about family members. The information he gathered was also used to write this book. Actual letters written from the foxholes of the civil war are typical of the documents used to complete this book. Our past can only be retrieved from what we remember and from the historical records that have been kept. Without memories and without records, we have no personal history!