Grave Consequences Has an Expected Date of Birth

Thursday, January 9th, 2020     by Debra DuPree Williams     Start the Conversation

By Debra DuPree Williams @DDuPreeWilliams
I’m so excited to finally have a tentative date for publication of my first novel. The thing is, it isn’t carved in stone so I can’t share it with you yet. If you’d like to be one of the first to hear the date and if you’d like to be on my launch team, sign up for my newsletter and you’ll be among the first to know.
Don’t know what a launch team is? Some authors call it their street team or their dream team. These are people who agree to help you get out word about an upcoming book or event, such as a book signing. For the most part, I’ll be doing all the work, you agree to share memes I’ll be making with everyone you reach, spread word any way you can. Plus, I would greatly appreciate it if you’d pray for me and for this book. If you can do nothing but pray, believe me, that is huge. This book isn’t going anywhere without God there to guide it.
Shared Birth Dates
In talking to my editor this week, I shared the following with her and she said I need to tell you all. Firstly, the tentative date I’ve been given is close to my Daddy’s one-hundredth birthday. How cool is that? He would be so proud. Secondly, it’s a genealogy-themed mystery. One of the mysteries in Grave Consequences is the location of a hidden grave.
I’m not giving away much here. But . . . the person whose grave is missing is based on a very real person in my family tree—my great-grandmother. I even kept her real name, Josie. Well, her first name, anyway. Don’t worry, no one else is real, and this is certainly a fictionalized version of her life. After thirty-plus years of searching for her grave, we still don’t know her final resting place. This is but a small part of the plot of Grave Consequences.
Genealogy Books
When I was a young girl of sixteen, my uncle gave me these two books, The DuPre Trail. They contained the genealogy of my family all the way back to the early 1600s. You can imagine how thrilled a sixteen-year-old was upon receiving such a gift. But I kept those books. They traveled with me from south Alabama to Birmingham when I went away to college. They traveled back to south Alabama when I graduated from college, then back to Birmingham again when I got married. When we moved from Alabama to Florida eleven years later in 1984, they went along for the ride.

 

 

Grave site of Josie’s Husband. She isn’t nearby.
It wasn’t until around 1999 that I pulled out those two books, proved my DuPree line, and joined the DAR, that those books finally made sense. Great-grandmother’s long-lost grave seemed to haunt me all the years since I first knew of her. Her story begged to be told, thus the creation of Charlotte Graves and Grave Consequences where Josie’s story comes alive within its pages.
I’ve become passionate about finding my roots and those of my husband’s family. I’m always amazed at how our stories and those of our families have crossed one another since at least the early 1800s if not much earlier. Lately, it seems that date is going to move back to the 1600s. I’ll keep you informed.
 

 

Come Back for More
Come back to my blog as I share more unbelievable stories of two lives that were meant to be joined, my husband and I.  Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

 

Do you have an unbelievable family story? Please join the conversation.

 

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