The story of Jared and Cornelia (Evans) Hoover in 1850s New Castle, Pennsylvania, is the source of The Rainbow of DysfunctionTM . The couple had three children before Cornelia died on April 12, 1854, leaving three small children without their mother’s love: Hiram, 7, Ephraim, 5, and Mary Jane, 1½. Afterwards, family members carried on the best they could. Jared remarried about two years later. The older brothers, Hiram and Ephraim, eventually started their own careers and left the area, while Mary Jane stayed in town and married a local man with long family ties to New Castle. Although Cornelia’s children had the appearance of normal adult lives by marrying and having children of their own, those children (Cornelia’s grandchildren) showed many dysfunctional behaviors, such as conflict-prone relationships, multiple divorces, shotgun marriages, and out-of-wedlock births. These adult children “behaved badly” as a means of coping with the family trauma they experienced and likely inherited. Extensive research into multiple generations of the Hoover family provided a new perspective: patterns of dysfunctional behavior that echoed through the generations. Even Cornelia’s great-grandchildren showed relationship difficulties. The Significant Life Events (SLEs), as defined by colors and applied to the family tree, showed how impactful those SLEs were on multiple generations. The Hoover family’s vibrant, multihued family tree became The Rainbow of DysfunctionTM . Researching the Hoover family and their various SLEs, created depth to their life stories, helped the Author better understand the Hoovers as people, triggered a lot of her memories, and showed her a new outlook on her own life. This book offers a way to look at your family and see those behaviors differently. Talking to relatives and collecting basic documents, such as birth notices, wedding announcements, and obituaries, can yield untold stories and family secrets. All of this information will help you identify the Significant Life Events (SLEs) in your family, define the colors of the SLEs, and observe the patterns that appear across your family. That family tree, with all of the colors and patterns visible, forms The Rainbow of DysfunctionTM for your family. This book guides you with instructions on how to understand the events and secrets that have kept you trapped in the past. The goal is to help you realize, " It’s not my fault. I wasn’t even there ." It’s a process for how you can move beyond family dysfunction and heal yourself .