How My Novel Originated in the Family Bible

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by Glynn Young @gyoung9751

When I was young child, I asked my father what the package was that sat on a shelf in his closet.
It was wrapped in brown grocery bag paper and tied with twine. “That,” he said, “is the family
Bible, and one day it will be yours.”

That day came during a visit home to New Orleans about 25 years later. Apologizing for the
sorry state it was in, my father thought I might find someone in St. Louis to restore it. Instead, I
did the time-honored thing and put in on a closet shelf. I did find a conservation box to store it in,
and I did handwrite a copy of the four pages of family records. But it sat on the shelf, just as it
had sat before.

But as I studied the family records, I noticed that the entries for births, deaths, and marriages
were all in the same hand, presumably that of my great-grandfather Samuel. He’d even signed
his name on an inside cover page. Samuel was something of a family legend, a legend which my
later research showed was almost entirely untrue. But he’d certainly written all of the entries.

And one death entry was a mystery, a Jarvis Seale who’d died April 6, 1862. My father didn’t
know who this might be; perhaps a distant cousin, he thought.

In early 2022, my wife urged me to “finally do something” with the Bible; she had read a local
magazine article about a book conservator who lived about 15 minutes from our house. I made
the appointment, and I soon learned the history of the family Bible.

The conservator, who’d trained at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, told me the Bible was one of
thousands printed about 1870 and sold door-to-door by traveling salesmen. It was a popular item,
especially after the Civil War, when families in both North and South were looking for ways to
remember the relatives lost during the conflict. He explained that it would be prohibitively
expensive to restore the book; he recommended conserving it – stabilizing the family record
pages and some of the inside pages and rebinding the cover.

As we stood in his workshop and talked, he thumbed through the pages, and found something
both my father and I had missed – tucked away in the book of Jeremiah was a lock of auburn-
colored hair. Given that my great-grandmother Octavia had died relatively young at age 42, and
Samuel had never remarried, it was most likely a lock of her hair.

I was transfixed. At that moment, the idea for a novel was born.

For several years before, I’d been pursuing a reading interest in the Civil War. That interest fused
with the discovery of the lock of hair and the family legend about Samuel. The idea in my head
was a love story, to be sure, a story of war, a boy too young to fight who returns home a hardened
soldier, and a young girl who’d lost everything – position, wealth, and expectations.

I turned to the Family Search web site and spent long hours in research. It was there I discovered
the identity of Jarvis Seale. He’d married one of Samuel’s sisters; he and his wife had had five
children before Jarvis was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. To include him in the family
records meant that Samuel must have had significant regard for him; no other in-law is
mentioned. And the story of Jarvis joined the other stories for the novel.

Those records in the Bible, and that lock of hair, became the catalyst. And a novel was born.

Glynn Young is a national award-winning speechwriter, communications practitioner, and novelist. He’s the author of five published novels, Dancing PriestA Light ShiningDancing KingDancing Prophet;  and Dancing Prince; the non-fiction book Poetry at Work; and the recently published historical novel Brookhaven. Visit Glynn on Facebook, LinkedInPinterest, his blog, the Dancing Priest book page.

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