We welcome a guest post today from S. Scott Rohrer, author of Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. Popular literature and frontier studies stress that Americans moved west to farm or to seek a new beginning. In Wandering Souls, Rohrer argues that Protestant migrants in early America relocated in search of salvation, Christian community, reform, or all three. In this post, he discusses how reception of his new book helped draw him back to his own family's religious migration story.--ellen In the corner of our living room sits a stately 213-year-old secretary made of...