Stephen Watts
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The child of an Air Force family, Stephen Watts was born in West Germany. He is the grandnephew of Harold Carleton, the main subject of Stephen’s second book.
Stephen began organizing his family’s genealogical files, tracing his lineage, and transcribing the family correspondence in 1996. His English immigrant great-great-grandfather’s correspondence inspired his first book, the award-winning Searching for Charles, published in 2022. Stephen grew up to serve in the Air Force himself. After nine years, he left to begin a three-decade career in the insurance industry before retiring in Georgia, where he lives with his still-tolerant wife, Karin.
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Searching for Charles: The Untold Legacy of an Immigrant's American Adventure
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Non-Fiction, History, Biography, Memoir
Searching for Charles provides full transcriptions of the correspondence, on file in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, of a nineteenth-century English immigrant prairie pioneer. For nearly two decades, Charles Watts tried to persuade his brother Edward to leave London with his family and join Charles in the United States. By the time Edward made the journey, he had been preceded by the brothers' step-nephew. In all, thirteen relatives followed Charles to America; some of their descendants continued farming in and around Bureau County, Illinois, into the twenty-first century. Watts's articulate, eloquent, and impassioned letters provide remarkably vivid descriptions of his experiences, thoughts on world political events, hopes for the future, and the despair he felt over the years as he received news of the loss of one friend or family member after another. Readers of Charles Watts’s letters will feel as though they know the man and are present in his time and place. Searching for Charles provides the background and context of these letters, describes his legacy in the form of his descendants and those of other family members who followed him, and documents the five-decade genealogical investigation by subsequent generations to piece together Watts’s story and to find his final resting place. 
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Searching for Harold: One Family's World War II Story in Letters
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Non-Fiction, History, Biography, Memoir
For a family separated by war but united through mail, what happens if the letters stop? As World War II ravages the globe, one scattered American family is held together by ink, paper, and hope. Harold Carleton is in Europe with one of his brothers; another is in the jungles of the Pacific islands; a nephew is training pilots in Texas; his brother wants to leave school and join the fight. At home, those left behind face a quieter battle against rationing, anxiety, and the suffocating weight of the unknown. The mailbox becomes a lifeline; it’s the only link to the boys they love. Every letter feels like a victory; every silence, a haunting threat. Which will arrive next: the US Post Office with a treasured letter, or Western Union with a dreaded telegram? Searching for Harold is the poignant, intimate portrait of a family caught in the crosswinds of history’s greatest conflict, told through the letters that kept their hopes alive. 
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