Frank Carlson Library

Eleven-year-old Michael Patrick Kelly from New York City is sent to a foster home, a Missouri farm with a sadistic owner, a bullying son, and a number of secrets, one of which may be murder.

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.

Volume 3.

"Lily Chalmers wanted only two things from life -- a farm of her own, and to find the sisters she hadn't seen since they were all little girls heading West on the orphan train ... She certainly had no desire for a husband. Yet proud, innocent Lily had no idea what desire meant until she met Major Caleb Halliday, a man who could ignite her very being with a touch ... a glance ... a whisper. Sheltered in his arms, Lily rode the crest of a wild, helpless...

Volume 2.

In 1863, eleven-year-old Peg Kelly is drawn into the dangerous activities of a mysterious young woman who takes refuge with the Kelly family in Missouri after fleeing the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by William Quantrill and his Confederate raiders.

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.

Ten-year-old Lucy, an orphan who wants a little sister more than anything, finds a very special one in the less than perfect family which she joins.

When 62 orphans and abandoned children leave New York City on a train headed out West, they have no idea what to expect. Will they get separated from their friends or siblings? Will their new families love them? Will a family even pick them at all? Future events are wilder than any of them could imagine -- ranging from kidnappings and whippings to stowing away on wagon trains, from starting orphanages of their own to serving as missionaries to the...