Joan Lowery Nixon

In 1860, when their widowed mother can no longer support them, six siblings are sent on the orphan train by the Children's Aid Society of New York City to live with farm families in Missouri.

Inside a time capsule, Brian and Sean discover a decades-old mystery
In 1918, the people of Redoaks buried a time capsule full of messages for the future. Besides all the grown-up stuff, the fourth-graders of 1918 included a packet of letters to the fourth-graders of today—which means Sean Quinn is about to get a letter straight from the past! But when it comes time to crack the capsule’s seal, Sean and his brother Brian learn...

Deeply unhappy about the separation of her family because of poverty, twelve-year-old Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.

In 1863, eleven-year-old Peg Kelly is drawn into the dangerous activities of a mysterious young woman who had come to her home in Missouri after fleeing the raid of William Quantrill and his raiders on Lawrence, Kansas.

Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.

In 1902 sixteen-year-old Kristin travels with her family from Sweden to a new life in Minnesota, where she finds herself frustrated by the restrictions placed on what girls of her age are expected or allowed to do.

A clumsy and unattractive twelve-year-old, Aggie is sure no one will want to adopt her when she rides the orphan train out west, but when she meets the eccentric Bradon family she begins to have some hope. Includes historical information about orphan trains and the woman's suffrage movement.

After eleven-year-old orphan-train rider David Howard settles with a strict Texas farm family, his best friend, an ex-slave, is threatened by the growing presence of the Ku-Klux Klan.

A child imagines how things will be when he is eight, like his big brother.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, two years before the start of the American Revolution, nine-year-old Maria worries that her mother will lose her contract to publish official reports and announcements of the British government because she prints anti-British articles in their family-run newspaper.