First Person Tours

Description

Sightseers and travelers deserve a "first person" experience while touring.  Visitors should not only learn about and understand this remarkable place/person/thing/event but they should "feel" it, as well.  As much as possible these experiences should be delivered in the context of that moment so that the visitor is fully immersed in the experience.  This is the goal of First Person Tours.

My ancestor and namesake, Edward Drinker, was the first child of English parentage to be born on Philadelphia soil in 1680.  My family is an original Philadelphia family (greeted William Penn when he first arrived) and family members have always written about Philadelphia history.  Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, kept a diary about her life in Philadelphia from 1758 to 1807 which is an invaluable source for historians.  She traveled to Valley Forge during the encampment of the revolutionary army there to seek the release of her husband, Henry Drinker, and other prominent Quakers, who had been exiled to Virginia for refusing to swear an oath supporting the revolutionary cause.  Their religion forbade the swearing of such an oath even though they were staunch patriots.  My great aunt, Catherine Drinker Bowen, wrote Miracle at Philadelphia about the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

On my grandmother's side of the family I am descended from Arthur Middleton of Charleston, South Carolina, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an important South Carolinian and plantation owner.  I am also descended from James Logan, William Penn's secretary, later a mayor of Philadelphia, who built Stenton Mansion.  My ancestor, Sidney George Fisher, kept a famous diary from 1834 to 1871.

As a lifelong resident of the Philadelphia area, I am familiar with, and ready to provide tours for, all of its attractions.  Included in these are: Independence Hall National Historical Park and nearby sights and museums, Fairmount Park, the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Japanese House and Garden, Bartram's Garden, the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Valley Forge, the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Longwood Gardens, Winterthur, revolutionary battlefields, colleges and universities, New Hope, the Michener Museum, the shrines of St John Neumann and Our Lady of Czestochowa, and many  more.