Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family

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First published in 1989, Our Kind of People is Jonathan Yardleys
moving account of his family from the founding of America to the present day.
It is the story of the Yardleys, Gregorys, Ingersolls and Woolseys, families
prominent in the growth of the nation. But pre-eminently it is the story of
Helen and Bill Yardley, the author's parents, whose marriage forms the center
of this remarkable narrative.

When Bill Yardley first met Helen Gregory, in 1935, he was a post-graduate student of
education at Harvard and she a senior in the first graduating class at
Bennington. Over the next fifty years their lives would become inextricably
bound as they married and raised four children, Supported by Helen, Bill rose
through the ranks of the educational profession to become rector of Chatham
Hall, a small girls' school in Virginia. On his retirement they moved to a
house they built in Rhode Island.

Using the correspondence and records with which his parents scrupulously documented the
events of their lives, Jonathan Yardley has painted an eloquent and affecting
portrait of an American family and of a way of life that has now all but
passed. For this new edition he has added an afterword and an essay about his
mother.