One day I arrived late to school, and my teacher handed me my first primer, Splash. She told me to read the beginning chapter. I got so lost in the adventures of Dick and Jane I finished the book and discovered a life-long love of reading.

Some time after this but before second grade, I decided to make a family tree. I trailed my mother, pregnant with my second-to-last-sister, around our ranch-style house in Lafayette, California. I asked the names of aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins. Mom had no interest in the subject but answered with remarkable patience while dealing with my younger brother, my two preschool sisters, the ironing, and dinner. I loved writing everything down. Many of the names were familiar from my father's stories.

When I grew up, I followed paper trails in Kentucky, Alabama, and Texas. I photocopied deeds, tax lists, city directories, and census records. I sat in back rooms and sorted through huge books of civil and criminal trials. I searched file cabinets for property records, and paged through old books of birth certificates. I located county offices, libraries, and local history collections before GPS was invented. I learned to load microfilm machines and roll to the right year.

Most of my ancestor's houses are gone, but I drove through the areas where they had lived. One set of ever-so great grandparents took a circuitous trip to Texas from Alabama, and I traced their route by car.

With a hand-held mini-recorder, I taped my parents and dad's siblings. Most of their older relatives remembered the Civil War or heard about it first-hand. I found a retired postmaster who, as a child, knew my great-grandparents.

To my horror, it took three hours to transcribe a single hour of a recorded interview even with my Apple II E clone. I thanked God when someone invented laptop computers. Easily transported, I could write as my subjects talked.

I compiled much of this information, (approximately in chronological order) into a couple of family histories. One day, struggling to be accurate, I searched for hours to find documentation for someone's taxes for a particular year. Afterwards, I came to a decision to switch to fiction. My facts would be correct but not as specific as family histories required.

Fiction presented new challenges. I knew much about what my ancestors and their neighbors did but had few journals or letters describing how they felt. What issues did they consider before making their life-changing decisions? What inspired an ever so great-grandmother to learn to read as an adult? Why did an ancestor leave his church and join one experiencing persecution? What spiritual journey persuaded another to become one of the founders of a Baptist church?

One spring, unbeknownst to me and the medical profession, I was stricken by complications from an appendectomy. Pain took over my life. Cold and shivering, I distracted myself by wondering about my Gettysburg ancestor. A mini ball permanently disabled his leg. He left the army with an incredible limp but managed to somehow support his family for the rest of his life and father several more children, including (lucky for me) my great-grandmother. I wondered about how he coped. Was his pain constant? Did he worry about the future? Did his disability leave him depressed or angry?

I wanted to write about people like him and his family. They survived real hunger. Despite poverty and severe wounds, they carried on with their lives—even leaving all they knew in hopes of a better life in another state.

I try to the best of my abilities to make my characters people "of their time." Living in rural counties, they knew their behavior would affect their family's reputation. Marriage could be for practical reasons. Widowers remarried quickly, no matter how grief-stricken, because childcare and farming in the 19th century took at least two people. Of course, persons in the 1800s fell in love, but they saw the preacher instead of checking into a motel. (Which would have been difficult because the first motel was not open for business until December 12, 1925.)

Almost everyone attended church, read the Bible, and knew American, Greek, and Roman history. Children's names, like Franklin, Virgil, Lafayette, Theodosia, Lesbia, and Mordicai dot census records and birth certificates.

Most southern farm were small and families worked their fields themselves. They owned two or three sets of clothes—sometimes, all made from the same bolt of cloth. Their social activities revolved around church and neighbors.

Deciding to write historical fiction has filled me with joy and purpose. Each morning, I open my computer and remember the excitement of a little girl with her spiral notebook asking every two minutes, "And who were they related to?"