Just this week, several months after Sins of Liberty was first released, a reader connected to find out more about her family. The novel was the starting point for her message.
I love to hear from readers; it’s one of the greatest reasons to write a book.
Mr. Seybold, I’m currently reading “Sins of Liberty” which I really enjoy. Since it’s about German immigrants and references Alsace and the German language, I was wondering if you had any ancestors who lived in Cincinnati in the 1850’s with the last name of Seyboldt. My husband’s 4x great-grandfather, Hilaire Schreck was married to a Veronica Seyboldt ca. 1855. I’m trying to find out more the origins of this Schreck ancestor. Thanks for reading and please write more books like this one!
Kind regards,
Betsy Schreck
I don’t know about Cincinnati ancestors in the 1850s in our family, because great grandpa Josef emigrated to Michigan after that period. He was born in 1844, so unless his family brought him here as a boy, Cincinnati is probably not a stop that he made. He was a priest in 1875 in the Kalamazoo area, plus other postings throughout the rest of the century. He died in Luxembourg in 1916.
On the other hand, anything is possible, isn’t it? We have only a replica birth certificate for him, just the language of the document with dates filled in by hand more than a century later.
That kind of spelling difference in the name could signal a mistake by a clerk, or a reason to conceal a name. As you could see in my novel, Father Joe changed his name a little to avoid the scrutiny of churchmen
I’d be a lucky man to have someone chronicling my life in the form of a novel. Maybe that’s me. There’s two more volumes I could write in the legend of the Sternmann family, one around the Roaring 20s and the Depression, then another around WW II and postwar Boomer times. It all follows the track of my family on my dad’s side. The third book would bring in my mother, born of poor folks named Dukes.
Do you have family members who are a secret to you? It’s how Sins of Liberty started for me, and I chose to create a story to resolve some mysteries.