Made In My Likeness is an autobiography. My name is Lawrence Reinhold. My parents are Josephine and Carl Reinhold. There are twelve children in my family of which I am the oldest of the six youngest. There are eight girls and four boys. I am the youngest boy and have five younger sisters. The age range from the youngest to the oldest is sixteen years almost to the day. We grew up on a 320-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. As kids, we worked on the farm until we graduated from high school. Then we left home.

I wrote Made In My Likeness when I was 53-54 years old, give or take a year or two. I was the same age as my mother when she wrote Tears & Joy. In many respects, I wish I had written Made In My Likeness when I was 25. I’m sure my pencil would have been sharper and the imagery would have been clearer. But, possibly, the additional 30 years allowed for more context, insight and understanding. I'm not sure how I scored in those categories, so I recommend reading Tears & Joy in conjunction with Made In My Likeness. They are companion Books. I don’t think it matters which is read first.

In a nutshell, Tears & Joy is written from my mother's perspective while Made In My Likeness is written from her children's perspective as childen growing up, through age 18, on my parent’s farm in Medford, Wisconsin. I also included my brothers and sisters’ perspectives to the extent they gave one. Even my mother’s perspective appears now and again. When I was in the Marine Corp and later in undergraduate, graduate, and law school, I would tell people about my life on our family farm. They listened, although I doubted they believed my stories. They always said, “You should write a book.” I always laughed, thinking their comments contained more sarcasm than a genuine belief that my story was of interest to others. My brothers, sisters, and I often discussed growing up over the years, mostly laughing at the experience, but not always. At a point just before Dad died, we were telling stories by email and having a good laugh. There was some concern that people reading our activities might get the wrong impression since each story was individualized without a frame of reference. Also, at one point, I tried to get my brothers and sisters to write a biography about growing up. Some did. Some didn’t. One day it dawned on me that I could write about growing up. I realized I already had a large amount of material. I had all the family pictures and related documents, too. I only needed to write a frame of reference and add some additional thoughts. Still, it took a year to writeMade In My Likeness. I wrote it to supplement Mom’s book, Tears & Joy. Her Book is written from her point of view. Us kids grew up on that farm and we have a point of view, too.

Hopefully future family members will become acquainted with Mom and Dad, and their twelve children by reading this Book and Mom’s book. I would like them to know our thoughts, see our life, feel our happiness, anger and passion, and experience our achievements through our own words. Once the twelve of us pass, our family will be so disintegrated that future family members will have great difficulty trying to reconstitute our family — Mom and Dad, and their twelve kids. And even if they put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, they will have no understanding of our life on the farm. I want to keep Mom, Dad and us twelve kids’ spirit alive and together long after we are all dead, and our ashes have been dispersed by the wind.

The following links are to Made In My Likeness.