A Novel Based on Family Lore

Set in the mid-1800s, A Gripping Tale of Desperation, Disaster, and Determination

It's 1844 in Swansea, a grimy industrial town in South Wales dominated by copper smelters. John Gibson, destitute and desperate, has just turned eighteen and he's drunk, at the mercy of a recruiter who signs him to a twenty-year stint in the British Army. Sober, hungover, and frightened, he runs away, across the Bristol Channel to Tiverton, in Devonshire, England, where he changes his name to Taylor and is taken on as an apprentice to become a cordwainer, a shoemaker. He falls in love with Molly Lake, his boss's comely, smart, and feisty seventeen-year-old daughter.

The young couple marry and begin a family. But life is brutally harsh, and they make plans to immigrate to America. John travels ahead to find work and sends money for Molly and the children to join him. But mid-Atlantic, her ship is plagued by deadly disease and torn apart by a raging storm. A passing steamship sees the burning wreck and watches in horror as it sinks into the sea. They report all were lost.

The story is based on family lore set out in a letter written by a beloved aunt forty years ago, years before the invention of the internet and genealogy search engines. What she wrote was based on what she'd heard over the years, with lots of guesses and uncertainties-as much mythology as history. But the story she told was a gripper--tracing the uncertain origins of John William Gibson Taylor and Mary Lake, their romance and marriage, the dire challenges they faced in poverty-stricken Victorian England, and their desperate and dangerous flight to America.