J.A. Snow – I Have a Story to Tell

Over forty years ago, I embarked on an incredible journey: digging up the roots of my family tree.

It whisked me away to such remote places of the world as the quaint hamlet of Porlock on the southwest coast of England, where I found myself among pirates and smugglers. It dragged me through the bloody streets of London during Tudor times to suffer the black death and the cruel hand of Henry VIII. It drew me up the gangplank of a ship sailing across the Atlantic to an unknown place called Plymouth Colony to struggle and come close to starving to death. It found me in the trenches of the bloody Civil War and spying on the redcoats on old Cape Cod. And, long before that, it had me jumping aboard a Viking longship to pillage and plunder, sending me on a rescue mission for a kidnapped princess to the wilds of Norway and fighting on the island of Orkney. My family has seen it all.

girl writing, etc.usf.edu

But, I guess to understand where I came from and why I began to write, I must go back to my early childhood, back to the fifth grade as I recall. The class was studying the solar system, and I sat down and wrote my first short story: “My First Trip to the Moon.” Writing has been a part of my life ever since. When I was only thirteen years old, my English teacher saw a spark in me and told me about a national short story contest put on by Scholastic Magazine. It was then that I wrote my first award-winning piece, “I’ll Just Watch,” which received fourth place and got my picture in the newspaper. From that time, as my grandmother put it, I was destined to write the story of my family.

It began one day at my dining room table with a three-ring binder, a box of sharp pencils, and some blank family pedigree sheets. I went to work piecing together the giant jigsaw puzzle that would be my genealogy. Today, that binder has grown to three huge notebooks and sixty generations of what can only be described as the history of a remarkable family.

But it didn’t happen overnight. You must remember this began long before computers and Ancestry.com. I did my research the old-fashioned way, reeling through old microfilm in the Mormon library and writing hundreds of letters (via snail mail) to various county clerks and state registrars of vital statistics to obtain copies of old birth certificates, wills, and military records.

I corresponded with every distant cousin I could find and wrote down all the family stories they shared with me.

Still, the idea of writing a series of historical novels had not entered my mind. I continued to write, of course. To a writer, picking up a pen or sitting down at a keyboard is as vital to life as breathing (well, almost). I tried my hand at poetry, winning a few awards and being published in the pages of literary magazines. I wrote some novellas and mysteries and began submitting them to large publishing houses. But as any writer will tell you, that process can be long and discouraging. I had almost given up the hope of ever seeing my name on the cover of a book when my older brother suggested publishing my stories as Kindle books. And the rest, as they say, is history. Fourteen independently published books later, seven of which are historical novels, I find myself on a mission of writing one book every year to finally give faces and new life to the names that fill the dusty notebooks on my shelf.

The one thing I discovered in all my years of research was that if you can trace back far enough, you will eventually find you are related to some well-known people. I was fortunate in that there are many famous faces lurking among the branches of my family tree. I have traced direct bloodlines to Emperor Charlemagne, Rollo the first Count of Normandy, William Longsword, and Richard the Fearless. My eleventh-generation great grandmother was Constance Hopkins Snow who came to America on the Mayflower. I also count such notables as William the Conqueror and Eleanor of Aquitaine among my direct line, which are on my to write about list. So many stories to tell and so little time left to tell them! It has been an amazing ride and it’s not over yet!

Here is the link to my Amazon page where all of my books are available. The historical books are in soft cover and also Kindle E-format. They are also on the shelves of all San Diego County libraries.

https://www.amazon.com/J.A.-SNOW/e/B00DFK4I50/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1517750555&sr=1-

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