Roots Revisited: A Hometown Study

Decades after pulling up stakes, three sixty-something Canadians living in three different countries are drawn back to the town in which they spent their formative years and built their lifelong friendship. In Roots Revisited, they share their memories of the town that molded them and sent them on their way, and examine the effect of those hometown experiences on their adult lives out in the world. They go on to chronicle what has become of their hometown, and examine the effect the place has had on those who never left and on members of a younger generation deciding whether to leave or stay. Employing a variety of research methods and undertaking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the authors observe and trace key developments in their hometown over the past half century, examine how those developments pertain to the wider modern world, and illustrate how their journey reflects the experience of countless people who’ve left the towns and cities in which they grew up only to find, sometimes half a century later, that they’ve retained more of their hometown roots than they ever realized.

Steven Verrier (BA, BEd, MA, MA) has worked as a high school teacher, a college instructor, an editor, and a musician. His publications include Raising a Child to Be Bilingual and Bicultural (2003), Class Struggle: Journal of a Teacher In Up to His Ears (2011), and The Two-Party Trap: Recipe for Dysfunction in American Politics (2022).