Most of you like historical fiction, but this book is a little different. This one is non-fiction with a little creative flair to make it enjoyable to read.

This is another story where I reached my 2x great-grandparents Jerry and Rachel Roe and couldn’t find records to grow my tree further back in time. I didn’t even have any suspicions or ideas about where to find the information. So this one remained unsolved for more than fifteen years until my mother did a DNA test for me. It wasn’t long before a lovely lady, Rhonda, contacted me to say she was a cousin.

She asked me a strange question: “Did your mom speak Romani, and were your mom and dad both gypsy?”

I really did not know how to answer that, other than, “No, why?”

As it turns out, we were descended from a long line of Romani ancestors who came to America in the mid-1800s to escape persecution in England, only to suffer the same fate here. But this time the families began to systematically assimilate to the American way of life. Within a hundred years, their descendants no longer lived in wagons or traveled from town to town. They buried their past so effectively that only a handful of their descendants knew of their history. As I began to peel back that onion layer by layer, I discovered that those few who knew the family history also weren’t very keen to share it — especially when they found out I wanted to write about it. I didn’t hide that fact from anyone. I was very open about it, and as a result suffered many slammed doors. But Rhonda was as open a book as she could be with what she knew, and that is why I honored her and a couple of others in the book. Unfortunately, she is no longer with us.

This book chronicles my journey through that history and adds a bit of creative license to make it an interesting read.