Unalaska, AK – One of Unalaska's most notable writers is back in town this week sharing his new book.

Ray Hudson will be signing copies of Family After All: Alaska's Jesse Lee Home at two events in Unalaska this week. The book is an account of the Jesse Lee Home, a Methodist-run orphanage that operated in Unalaska from 1890 to 1925 before moving to Seward.

The book is published by Hardscratch Press, a California-based publishing house run by the Seward-born writer Jackie Pels. Hudson said the project came about after Pels contacted him for a book she was writing, about the Jesse Lee Home's Seward days.

"To her, the Jesse Lee Home meant Seward, but she felt she should have a little background on the Unalaska years," he said. "So she contacted me, and I had a slew of information on the place. So she asked me if I would write a history on the Unalaska years--so that's what I've done, and it's ended up as this massive tome of about 400 pages."

The Jesse Lee Home was opened by Methodist missionaries, who were seeking to win converts from the Russian Orthodox faith that dominated Unalaska in the late 19th Century. Although it started off as an orphanage for girls, it later expanded to house boys as well, and the Methodist church also branched out to run the first public school in Unalaska.

To research the early days of the home, Hudson went through letters and other documents in Methodist archives on the East Coast. He said many of the early accounts of Unalaska the missionaries sent back to the Lower 48 were quite grim--but they had good reason to exaggerate.

"The early Methodists were always talking about the men in the shape of human wolves who were prowling around, so they had to rescue these girls," he said. "Well, part of the reason was that the Alaska bureau of the Women's Home Missionary Society was in competition with, say, the African bureau and the Chinese bureau. So they had to make the picture as gloomy as possible, so that people would donate money and try to get the home established."

In 1925, the Jesse Lee Home relocated to Seward, where it stayed until it was destroyed in the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Those years will be detailed in Jackie Pels' forthcoming book, which will form the second half of a two-volume set with Hudson's work.

Ray Hudson is also the author of Moments Rightly Placed, a memoir about life in Unalaska, where he lived for nearly three decades until he moved to Vermont in 1992. He'll be speaking and signing books at the library at 6 p.m. tomorrow and at the Museum of the Aleutians at 7 p.m. Copies of Family After All: Alaska's Jesse Lee Home will be available for purchase.