First Generations tells the story of the women who helped create America, the foremothers of our modern-day society. Since these are the women from whom many of us descend, the concept of representing this collective genealogy led to the visual representation of a genealogy chart. The yellowed background and type are repsesentative of broadsides and other printed ephemera of colonial times. It was important to represent these women in a general sense on the cover, even though the stories of specific women are related in the book, because it is their collective experience that helped to shape us all.