Family Forest

Families come in all shapes and sizes. Half-sisters, big brothers, step-parents. While some kids have a family tree, others have a family forest!

Free enterprise is not dead! It still lives in the hearts and souls of those who dare to dream and believe in their dreams. An inspiring story, The Enchanted Forest and Its Family, gives the history of Oregon's oldest family owned theme park and of the family that made it possible. The pitfalls of starting a business from scratch are sometimes overwhelming to a young person or family trying to make their mark in the world. This book tells of the struggles of such a family with meager resources who relied on their love of family, many talents, desire, and hard work. Roger Tofte spearheaded the drive to fulfill his dream. He had a vision and with his artistic skills nothing seemed impossible. The young family, including four children, struggled and did without in order to overcome adversities. it was often a bag of cement at a time. But it could be done! From humble beginnings, the theme park flourished to become one of Oregon's leading attractions. The author, Mavis Tofte, knows her subject well. As the wife of Roger Tofte, she ran the business during the early years and helped where needed. When cancer threatened her life in 1978, it only meant another challenge to overcome. Responsibilities were delegated to the children who assumed more than their share of duties to help the family. After retirement, the author turned to writing with a passion.

This “powerful” (BuzzFeed) award-winning debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers. “Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung’s elegant storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family. “Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year.”—Literary Hub

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

This "stunning journey through a country that is home to exhilarating natural wonders, and a scarring colonial past . . . makes breathtakingly clear the connection between nature and humanity, and offers a singular portrait of the complexities inherent to our ideas of identity, family, and love" (Refinery29). A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew. Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities. Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.

From a peaceful existence deep in the forest, the lure of adventure leads Bernardo into a foreign war. Years later, he returns as an unrecognizable stranger. Using the lore of generations, his wife and two daughters set out to heal him. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The result of more than twenty years' research, this seven-volume book lists over 23,000 people and 8,500 marriages, all related to each other by birth or marriage and grouped into families with the surnames Brandt, Cencia, Cressman, Dybdall, Froelich, Henry, Knutson, Kohn, Krenz, Marsh, Meilgaard, Newell, Panetti, Raub, Richardson, Serra, Tempera, Walters, Whirry, and Young. Other frequently-occurring surnames include: Greene, Bartlett, Eastman, Smith, Wright, Davis, Denison, Arnold, Brown, Johnson, Spencer, Crossmann, Colby, Knighten, Wilbur, Marsh, Parker, Olmstead, Bowman, Hawley, Curtis, Adams, Hollingsworth, Rowley, Millis, and Howell. A few records extend back as far as the tenth century in Europe. The earliest recorded arrival in the New World was in 1626 with many more arrivals in the 1630s and 1640s. Until recent decades, the family has lived entirely north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The result of more than twenty years' research, this seven-volume book lists over 23,000 people and 8,500 marriages, all related to each other by birth or marriage and grouped into families with the surnames Brandt, Cencia, Cressman, Dybdall, Froelich, Henry, Knutson, Kohn, Krenz, Marsh, Meilgaard, Newell, Panetti, Raub, Richardson, Serra, Tempera, Walters, Whirry, and Young. Other frequently-occurring surnames include: Greene, Bartlett, Eastman, Smith, Wright, Davis, Denison, Arnold, Brown, Johnson, Spencer, Crossmann, Colby, Knighten, Wilbur, Marsh, Parker, Olmstead, Bowman, Hawley, Curtis, Adams, Hollingsworth, Rowley, Millis, and Howell. A few records extend back as far as the tenth century in Europe. The earliest recorded arrival in the New World was in 1626 with many more arrivals in the 1630s and 1640s. Until recent decades, the family has lived entirely north of the Mason-Dixon Line.