Hi, I’m Carolyn, a homeschooling wife and mom of two.  In my life B.K. (Before Kids) I was a credentialed math teacher, having earned a bachelor’s degree at a Bible college in Central California.  I’m currently developing some math curriculum.  If you’d like to know more, sign up for updates here.

My road into history and writing fiction took a novel route.  (Hence the name, Novel Historian.)  Way back in the Jurassic era (according to my kids) my favorite high school English teacher challenged our senior class to compete for a local historical society’s scholarship.  We had to research local landmarks, interview longtime residents, and write up the results.  This was during the era of dusty tomes and microfiche archives, hence the Jurassic designation.

The iconic building in historic, Gold-Rush-era Shingles Springs, California, intrigued me.  It had a sign in the 1980s labeling it as the old shingle mill.  During the research process, I learned it had been a store, a home, even a relief station during wartime where women rolled bandages to ship overseas.  The shingle mill, however, had been located a short distance away on the creek.  Spelunking into the archives in Sacramento to prove my thesis paid off:  I won the scholarship.

A love for writing and history persisted during college, but my career path took a different arc until many years later.  While I was recovering from a major surgery, my mom gifted me with a correspondence class about novel writing.  The assignments from that class and my experience living in California’s Mother Lode became the basis of my Running Home novel series, recently published on Amazon Kindle.

Novel writing took a back seat to homeschooling in my kids’ early years, however, because both of them struggled to read.  That sent me on a search for ways to bring history to life for them, preferably without required reading.  I found a lot of audio books and other online content, many of which I share on the pages of this website.

I also created multi-media history presentations for our homeschool co-op, a couple of which are available by subscription to SchoolhouseTeachers.com.  The Depression-era musical drama I co-wrote with my husband in 1995 was performed by the co-op students at Christmastime in 2015.  And of course, I have continued writing creatively on the side.

It is my hope that you’ll find new resources on this site to help you bring history to life for yourself or your students, and that you’ll add your own favorites to our list.