Description

Award winning former Chicago Tribune staff photographer and travel writer Charles Osgood traces the journeys of his ancestors during their travels to Europe in 1914, at the brink of WWI. A century later, in 2014, he followed their itinerary to see what had changed, and find what remains the same.

The typed journals of his great aunt and grandfather, embellished with their snap shots and colored post cards, are reproduced exactly as he found them, with dog-eared yellowed pages and faded images that look and feel like the originals. His blog/journal, emblazoned with his own digital visual discoveries, documents the contemporary and ever-changing continent, often revealing how little seems to have changed.

So much of what his ancestors saw appears today almost mystically as they describe it, despite an intervening century and the mass destruction of two world wars. At the risk of disappointing potential readers, this book is not about Dutch Love, but the euphoric excitement of travel, history, contrast, and daily surprise.

On April 2, 1914, my great aunt, Winifred Salisbury, sailed for the Azores to begin her eleven week odyssey through Europe. On June 16, 1914, her brother-in-law (my grandfather) Fredrik Hansen, began his only trip back to his homeland, Sweden. It is unclear why they both chose that year to travel, but perhaps fear of war created a certain urgency. A century later, on August 18, 2014, I set off to discover what remained of the pre-WWI Europe