Lives of Consequence, published this month by the Portsmouth Historical Society’s Portsmouth Marine Society Press, is a shockingly expansive and revealing new book. Wall’s painstaking research has uncovered, not just a few, but hundreds of forgotten African and mixed race residents. Her work focuses on the large colonial parish of “Old Kittery,” just across the New Hampshire border. The 18-mile wide seacoast parish now includes the picturesque towns of Eliot, Berwick, and South Berwick, Maine.