About SECrie.com
Edward and Nora (Williams) Callahan and family. Shoup, Idaho 1934.
This work is built from what can be found—and what can be carefully understood.
The stories on this site draw from primary sources whenever possible: newspapers, letters, public records, and family papers. Each piece is assembled from the surviving record, then set within its historical context. Where the record is clear, it is followed. Where it is incomplete, it is left as such.
No part of these histories is imagined. The aim is not to fill in what is missing, but to understand what remains.
What began as a search for one story became many. Over time, one life led to another, one place to the next, until a broader picture began to take shape—of families moving across distance, adapting to circumstance, and making lives where they could.
About S.E. Crie
Raised on white bread and bloody war stories, I was a child of the 1950s who came of age during the turbulent decades of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Our family moved often — by ocean liner, plane, or car — each relocation paired with long journeys that exposed me early to a wider world. In 1967, we made our final move to Southern California, where both sides of my parents’ families had eventually settled. Reunited at last with my aunts and one uncle, I never tired of hearing their stories about childhood and about the grandparents I never had the chance to know. My grandfather died before I was born, and my grandmother passed away within weeks of the only visit I remember with her, when I was five.
Perhaps because I never had much sense of home, or the chance to know my grandparents, I grew determined to rebuild their lives from every memory and record I could find. And maybe what has driven me most is plain curiosity. What about my grandparent's parents?
Today, decades of research have grown into extensive collections of photographs, correspondence, documents, and family narratives rooted in larger historical events. Secrie.com is my ongoing effort to organize and share that work, preserving individual lives within their historical context so that ordinary people — and the worlds they inhabited — are not forgotten.
If you have information to contribute, notice an error, or wish to share related research, I welcome hearing from you.
— S.E. Crie
S.E. Crie, 1955