Boston guys & gals book club

Local author Anna Hanson will be presenting Buried Secrets: Looking for Frank and Ida and taking part in the discussion. We’re excited to support a local author and host this special event!

“It’s hard to put this book down, to be honest, because it is well written and full of surprises.”
~ Genealogists’ Magazine

What if the people you loved most had built their lives on a lie so deep it erased their past?

When Anne Hanson’s father asked her investigate the genealogy of his parents, Frank and Ida, she thought it would be a simple bit of family research. Instead, she stepped into a twenty-year mystery that defied every genealogical tool, every archive search, and every historical record.

For decades, Anne found nothing—no parents, no siblings, no immigration documents, not a speck of evidence that her grandparents’ families had ever existed at all.

It was as if Frank and Ida Hanson had simply appeared out of thin air.

But they hadn’t.

The truth she eventually uncovered would shake everything she believed about identity, family, and love. Following a trail that stretched back to the early twentieth century, Anne unearthed who her grandparents really were—and the reasons they left behind the lives they once lived. Her discoveries revealed a hidden world of heartbreak, social pressure, and survival, at a time when a young couple could vanish from their community and reinvent themselves without a trace. Their choices reshaped the destiny of every generation that followed.

Yet Buried Secrets: Looking for Frank and Ida is more than a genealogical detective story. It is a deeply human love story—about a couple whose devotion gave them the courage to escape the constraints of their time, and the enduring bond between a father longing for answers and the daughter determined to find them.

A gripping journey into forgotten history, identity, and the power of family, this true story will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered what mysteries might lie within their own family tree.