Bøger af Michael Paul Hurd

Jonathan and Bethany Harris are retired naval officers. A twist of fate while on board Jonathan's inherited yacht separates the couple. After an extensive search by the United States Coast Guard, Captain Jonathan Harris, USN (Retired) is pronounced missing and presumed dead. Shortly after Jonathan's memorial service, Bethany unexpectedly finds herself pregnant despite her age. A visit to a medium not long after the birth of her son suggests that Jonathan may still be alive and an entry in his family tree prompts Bethany to dive deeper into Jonathan's history. Assembling a team of skilled researchers, she eventually finds Jonathan - but not in a manner or situation she could ever have expected.

While on his deathbed, King Henry VII knighted Thomas Overby, son of Shropshire landowner Sir Edmund Overby. By the dying King's command, Sir Thomas was immediately thrust into service, becoming Royal Standardbearer to the new King Henry VIII. However, Sir Thomas's position, which gave him anonymity even with its constant visibility, was merely a cover for his emergence as one of Henry's most trusted spies. As time goes on, Sir Thomas becomes a close confidant and envoy of the Crown and is heavily involved in the construction of Henry's favorite ship, Mary Rose. Constant proximity to Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, impacts both Sir Thomas and his wife, Lady Joan, in ways that neither of them expected before moving from their Shropshire estate to Greenwich Palace in London.

In a setting devoid of modern technology or modern transportation a family story unfolds in the mid-18th century. Richard Harris served multiple capacities before family circumstances interfered. He served as a Presbyterian deacon, an attorney and a captain in the Connecticut militia before the French and Indian War. Though he was forced to resign from the militia service, he maintained a strong friendship with a Mohegan Indian sachem and his family. Their sons both went off to fight in the war and somehow survived, with one of them becoming an accomplished sharpshooter and the other a First Sergeant. In this story, love still blooms as Colonists began to marry Mohegans, children are found and some are lost - but they endure the struggles of their time in history.The publisher's recommended retail price for this paperback is $14.99.

Germans, either by nationality or ethnicity, made their mark on the United States in the late Ninteenth and early Twentieth Centuries in the two decades leading up to World War I. Taking up mostly agricultural pursuits, some settled in Southwestern Michigan, and Berrien County in particular. Where did they come from? How did they get to Michigan? What difficulties did they face?Emma Waldheimer and Freddie Fenstermacher were of the first generation born in the United States. They grew up in German farming families. A chance meeting at a fruit market near the beginning of the Great Depression was enough for the two of them to fall in love. Eloping on Emma's eighteenth birthday, the young couple was quickly catapulted into adult life with all of its trials, tribulations, and conflicts. "The Germans" tells the story of how two ethnic German families emigrated from Imperial Russia to Berrien County Michigan, were eventually joined by marriage, and assimilated into American life. Most realized early on that this assimilation and especially the mastery of English was the essence of survival and prosperity. The one area that retained its German flavor was worship. The German community, wherever they settled, established churches and generally conducted services auf Deutsch, making it their own language of faith, not unlike Latin was to Roman Catholics.

Family roots are often based on legends passed on from one generation to the next. With those legends, certain inaccuracies are injected into the conversation - sometimes to avoid embarrassment; other times, to inflate the persona of the ancestor. Rarely are family histories totally accurate, and it takes significant research by an interested party to attempt to sort out the fact from the fiction. Even seemingly accurate information conveyed from one generation to the next is now genetically challengeable by the myriad of DNA tests that are available, often with surprising results. Regardless of the family information conveyed to successive generations, or the genetic accuracy of that information, each of our families have skeletons hidden in our closets that, until someone delves into them, remain safely hidden from unsuspecting or disinterested descendants. Once uncovered, however, those skeletons can be quite surprising in some cases and very enlightening in others. This book takes a look at one of those families - through the lens of an amateur genealogist who makes some pretty revealing discoveries along the way. There are murders and peccadilloes of all sorts, trysts, migrations, slave ownership, ties to both British royalty and New World "landed gentry," brothers against brothers in the American Civil War, and the full range of juicy tidbits that no family can escape. The information in this book is not laid out in chronological order; rather, the author chose to arbitrarily travel through time, both backward and forward in a series of vignettes, to visit some of the more interesting situations that were uncovered in the family that was the subject of his genealogical research. Each chapter has at least one element that is based on a historical fact. However, the details filled in around that central fact are based on the author's perception of what "might have been." The challenge throughout this novel was to seamlessly blend historical facts and fiction. Because the basic premise of the book is fiction, there is no bibliography to cite historical sources.