My work on family papers has brought me to learn and write about a tumultuous period between 1860 and 1920 in Urumia Persia. As an academic teacher and researcher focussing on social and political change in Africa I chose not to learn about my own family history even though I knew it raised issues of end of empire and Western influence that I cared about. My mother was born in Urumia, Persia and her father and grandfather were missionaries there, but somehow I did not want to give thought and feeling to their lives and experiences. I feared measuring myself against my forebears. But the enthusiasm of an Iranian-born amateur historian and the discovery of revealing family papers that included two unpublished book manuscripts written by William Ambrose Shedd, who died in Persia in 1918, brought me to engage with the life and work of my missionary grandparents. The experience of this kind of historical engagement is the topic of this paper. I knew that William Ambrose Shedd, my mother’s father was seen as a martyr and a hero in the American Christian missionary field. The family papers revealed that he was also author of a biography of his father and also a thorough first-person account of the crisis in the mission and the region in the year 1915. I helped edit and get published the biography and continue to work on the editing and publication of the book about 1915. I discuss how my study of this very specific historical place and time allowed or forced me to gain a much deeper understanding of what my family means and to sort out my thoughts and feelings about the missionary enterprise. I learned to think in a more objective historian-like way and to discover how my family history fits into the vast story of modernizing change that engulfed the world between 1860 and 1920. I discovered that missionary documents were a rich source of historical information that had to be looked at together with other sources, especially accounts from the people living in the region. I learned to see Urumia, Persia as a particularly revealing microcosm of social transformation, to understand the roles of my forebears without having to identify with all their beliefs and purposes, and to appreciate the moral and political complexity of the dramatic social and cultural changes the Azerbaijan region of Persia in these years.