The Beginning

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I have had so many readers join my mailing list this month that I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. Those of you who have been with me over the last year, please bear with me. You have likely joined this list with one of two free books I offer: A Mother's Last Gift or Until We Meet Again. A Mother's Last Gift kicked off the series based on my Woolsey ancestors. And yes, I said based on my ancestors. 

This journey began twenty one years ago. It's hard to believe that my baby is now old enough to drink, which means I'm getting old, but so worth it when you become a Nana, but I digress. Anyway, twenty-one years ago we had two boys, and did not plan on having another child, but surprise I was pregnant again. When we crunched the numbers, it no longer made sense for me to keep working. Nearly my whole paycheck would go to daycare for three children. 

I was bored. I was so use to working all my adult life that I didn't know what to do with myself all those hours. My daughter was an easy and quiet baby. After watching an old Little House on the Prairie episode I got to thinking about my ancestors, so out of curiosity one day I just started poking around on the internet looking to see if I could find information about my ancestors. With each nugget of information I found, that rabbit hole became deeper and I was hooked. I became a self-taught genealogist, and I have spent the last twenty plus years collecting the stories of my ancestors and sharing them on my old blog, Untangled Family Roots. 

Fast forward to today, I now have twenty years of amazing stories that I want to share with the world, and many of the facts I find, don't tell all of their story. But my wild imagination fils in the gaps and the story becomes fiction and too large for a blog post. 

In Where the Compass Points I write about William Woolsey, my 3x great grandfather. I knew when I started to research him I knew he would not talk about who his father was or even mention his name. It took my many years to find out who his father was, and even longer before DNA proved the connection which was speculative at best. Once that connection to Richard Woolsey was confirmed, their story was one of the first stories I wanted to write. 

What could be better than a story about a father who abandons his only son by his second wife, takes five of his six children by his first wife and heads out onto the unsettled prairie of Arkansas. I eventually knew from records that William did in fact know who his father was, and even spent some time, after the death of his mother, with his much older step-sister while his father was off chasing the golden rainbow through Washington and Arizona Territory. These are the bones of the stories that are real. The names, places, dates from their lives are real. Even the mines that Richard owned and ran in Arizona are taken from newspaper articles writen about him, but the fiction is the gaps in betwee that we can never know since (as far as I know) there are no journals about their lives.

His Greatest Regret and Where the Compass Points is the story of Richard and William Woolsey a father and son. Be prepared to feel every emotion when reading these two books. Have tissue handy, as I've shared before, I cried in some places while writing pieces of these stories. 

I didn't forget about your weekly question.

If you are part of my newsletter, than you enjoy historical fiction. Do all the historical books you read need at least a little romance, or do you seek out emotion and a story of survival with grit?

That question is so broad, I'm sure there are a hundred different reasons. I can't wait to read why you love historical fiction. Just hit reply and let me know.

Yours Truly,

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