Jeanie Zick
Creator, Researcher, and Writer of Letters Through Time ~ Across the Distance
For as long as she can remember, Jeanie Zick has lived with one foot in the present and one tenderly planted in the past.
A lifelong genealogist, historical researcher, and writer, she spent years gathering names, dates, documents, and family histories. Yet she felt a quiet longing that the records alone could never fill. She wanted not only to trace her ancestors, but to step more fully into their world and understand the lives behind the ink.
That longing gradually became a vision: What if history could speak again—not from textbooks alone, but through letters as intimate and alive as those once carried by hand across distance and time?
From that desire, Letters Through Time ~ Across the Distance was born.
Many of these letters are rooted in Jeanie’s own family history, including ancestors such as Mara Sargeant, as well as historical figures who lived near, alongside, or within the same world as those family lines, such as Desire Minter. By bringing these real people to life through first-person letters, she hopes her children and future generations will feel a stronger, more human connection to the history that shaped their family and the wider world around them.
Built around real historical people, real places, and carefully researched settings, the series uses first-person letters to help modern readers encounter the past more personally and thoughtfully. Where the historical record is clear, it is followed closely. Where the record falls silent, careful reconstruction is used, always grounded in documented daily life, geography, labor, family relationships, and the known realities of the period.
The aim is not to replace history with fiction, but to bring history nearer, to make it more human, more readable, and more deeply felt.
A Note on the Letters
These letters are rooted in real historical people and surviving records, and are written not as modern summaries, but as immersive reconstructions meant to help readers encounter the past as lived experience.
Because history is not only what happened—it is what was lived.
If these letters speak to you, I invite you to step into the past and begin reading Letters Through Time ~ Across the Distance.
[Read the Letters →]