Family Ties Across the Ocean Roy & Patricia Weaver Publish No Voice of You: A Family Divided & Reunited By Jeff Eason Unless you are of pure Native American blood, you are an American who can trace his or her roots to somewhere else. A growing number of Americans have adopted the hobby of tracing their family’s genealogy to find out more about their ancestors, their homes and their customs. Boone residents Roy and Patricia Weaver have taken this genealogical detective work one step further. They have actually traveled to the European homeland of Patricia’s cousins in Slovenia. They learned firsthand how members of the Muller-Peterka family from Slovenia moved to America and settled in areas of West Virginia and Pennsylvania in the early part of the 20th century. After the Weavers returned from a trip to Slovenia in 2002, they decided to put much of the family history they had learned into a book. Roy and Patricia Weaver will read from their new book, No Voice of You: A Family Divided and Reunited, at Black Bear Books in Boone on Sunday, April 24 at 2 p.m. No Voice of You is filled with family memories that nearly every American can relate to. The hardships of the Muller-Peterka family—both in Europe and as immigrants in the United States—are both extraordinary and typical of the times. One ancestor, Jakob Muller, became Jake Miller in America. He and his wife Anna lived in a small town in West Virginia called Freeman that had a large Yugoslavian population. Work for men in the town meant going to the coalmines. When their eldest son, Frank, died in a mining accident, Anna’s health quickly degenerated. Eventually she died leaving Jake to care for six motherless children. The journeys taken by the six children make for a very interesting book. Some of the children returned to Europe in the mid-1930s and started their own families while others stayed in the Mid-Atlantic and Appalachian portions of America. “In September 2002 we made a brief trip to Slovenia to Patricia’s cousins and to see the place where her mother was born,” said Roy Weaver. “As we talked to her cousins, we realized that the story of these people needed to be told. Already much of the story of the Muller-Peterka family was lost and the people who remember her grandparents are getting old. “We began to gather all the information we could find about the two families in Slovenia and America. We visited Slovenia; South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and coal mining areas of West Virginia to see where and how they lived. We also collected any letters, pictures and other documents that we thought would help shed more light on the history of the Muller-Peterka family.” Both Roy and Patricia Weaver grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. In their spare time they enjoy gardening, traveling and writing. For more information on Sunday’s event, contact Black Bear Books in Boone at (828) 264-4636. Black Bear Books is located at 2146 Blowing Rock Road in front of Makoto’s Japanese Restaurant in Boone. Wendy Wisner’s Epicenter On Wednesday, April 27 at 7 p.m., author Wendy Wisner will read from and sign her newest book of poetry, Epicenter, at Black Bear Books. The event is free to the public. Light refreshments will be served. “Wendy Wisner’s first book of poetry is a stunning debut collection. Each poem is a lyrical tribute to the struggles of daily life infused with simple ardor and beauty.” Critics hail Wisner as an up-and-coming poet and believe her first collection of work “establishes her as a poet to follow.” Jan Heller Levi speaks of Wisner’s work saying, “These poems, one after the other, take my breath away and give breath back to me.” Wisner earned her MFA from Hunter College where she currently teaches expository writing. Recently Epicenter was the runner-up for the 2003 Custom Words poetry prize and finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starret Prize. For more information, call Black Bear Books at (828) 264-4636.