Saye Family Stories
Update!
Saye Family Stories: Perspectives on Life in the South, 1777-1899 has been fully funded on Kickstarter! A high-quality hardcover edition will be printed and distributed to backers and libraries. Thank you to everyone who supported the project!
Help me bring a remarkable 19th-century Southern memoir to print. Written by Asbury Washington Saye, it not only documents his family, but includes numerous anecdotes of everyday life in the South and four chapters of his understanding of larger cultural topics.
After twenty years editing, researching, and citing records confirming Saye’s statements, I am making the work available in print with significant additional supporting material, including citations, notes, a bibliography, family charts, and an index.
Support the Saye Family Stories project at Kickstarter to help me print high-quality hardcover copies of the book for long-term preservation at libraries, archives, and in your own home.
Kickstarter gives you the opportunity to pledge your support for the project as it nears the printing stage.
Imagine finding a handwritten memoir in your family’s papers—one that takes you back to a pivotal time in American history through the eyes of someone who lived it. That’s exactly what happened with Asbury Washington Saye’s memoir, written in 1899 when he was almost 70 years old.
Saye Family Stories: Perspectives on Life in the South, 1777-1898 is a carefully edited and annotated edition of this first-person account that speaks to history covering more than a century of Southern life—from frontier Georgia to the Civil War and then to Reconstruction and the late 19th century.
Passed down through the family, the work was transcribed by Asbury’s great-grandson Edwin Paul “Ed” Aposhian in 1993. I used the memoir in a family history published as “A Blue Ridge Family for Alsaph Briggs Barker” (National Genealogical Society Quarterly, 2010). While writing that article, I made my first contact with Ed about my interest in publishing a thoroughly edited version. He sadly passed away in 2020.
This isn’t your typical Civil War memoir from a general or politician. Asbury W. Saye was a yeoman farmer, Presbyterian minister, and ordinary man whose voice represents millions of everyday Americans whose stories have been lost to time. His memoir offers something rare: an unfiltered glimpse into how white Southerners experienced and processed the massive changes reshaping 19th-century America.
Saye witnessed nearly three quarters of a century of American history:
- Cherokee removal and the Gold Rush in Georgia (at age 9)
- The growing tensions over slavery (at ages 15-32)
- The trauma of the Civil War from a Southern perspective (at ages 32-36)
- The difficult adjustments of Reconstruction (at ages 38-48)
- Technological changes from handwoven cloth to railroads to the telephone
What makes this memoir special is its honesty. Saye doesn’t sanitize his views or experiences. In my editor’s foreword, I note: “Through Saye’s detailed observations and personal reflections, we encounter the nineteenth-century South not as an abstract historical entity but as a lived experience with all its complexity and contradiction.”
For more information and sample pages, see the Saye Family Stories project at Kickstarter.
Publication Details
Title: Saye Family Stories: Perspectives on Life in the South, 1777-1899
Author: Asbury Washington Saye
Editor: Paul K. Graham
Publisher: Monoceros Press, San Diego, CA
Publication Date: February 2026
Size: 6.14″ x 9.21″
Pages: 230+
Binding: Smythe Sewn, Linen, Hardcover