Hortense Schleiter meets a young archaeologist, Arthur Weigall. They fall in love and their marriage brings together two families. One has its roots in British imperial expansion abroad and missionary work in the slums at home, the other in the American melting pot of new arrivals from Germany. As time goes on and the lives of these two families intertwine and diverge, they record almost everything in letters to each other, and occasionally also in diaries. Hortense kept everything and her children wanted to understand the dramas and crises in which they grew up - so they kept the whole hoard, and with it the life of those times.