Kathleen Norris was a writer of romantic novels and short stories that had enormous appeal, particularly to women. One of her favorite themes involved virtuous women grappling with moral issues, for instance, affairs with married men. Her writings were labeled as sentimental and honest. The book begins: The beginnings of the family in America are lost, unfortunately, in the obscurity that hangs over the old records and the older homestead of a few insignificant New England villages. That there were Crabtrees in America before the war of the Revolution is provable, but it has never been quite easy to connect the Charlestown and the Springfield families of that name with that of one Reuben Crabtree, a wheel-maker of Mendon, Massachusetts, whose marriage to Hannah Pratt of Bridgewater, Connecticut, took place in the year 1760.