This is the second of a series of posts introducing the five-part historical fiction novel Unbowed, which will be published in November 2026. All five parts are based on true events and real people – my ancestors.The first post described the outcome of the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and one of its survivors, Malcolm MacCallum.
Ask any student of early American history about “frontier captivity narratives,” and they will likely point you to the famous 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts. The story of Eunice Williams—the Puritan minister’s daughter who was captured and refused to return to English society—became a literary sensation in the 1800s.
But history is a selective editor.
Further west, along the volatile, fluid borderlands of the Hudson River valley, a far more complex and terrifying theater of war was playing out. Outposts like Schenectady and Saratoga (the site of modern-day Schuylerville, New York) were the literal razor’s edge between the British and French empires. Yet, the brutal raids that shattered these communities, and the incredible cross-cultural stories of those who survived them, have been almost completely forgotten by the modern world.
In the mid-18th century, Saratoga wasn’t yet part of an historic battlefield—it was a vulnerable, isolated cluster of farms and mills carved out of an unforgiving wilderness. And on a freezing night in November 1745, that wilderness swallowed it whole.
If you open an early American historical ledger, you will witness a quiet, bureaucratic violence.
On the yellowed pages of parish registers, military rolls, and census tracts, the names of ordinary people undergo a strange, unsettling metamorphosis. A proud Scottish surname is flattened by an English soldier’s hurried quill. A French-Canadian patronym is chopped and mangled to fit the tongue of an Anglo-American land agent. A German-Dutch identity is phoneticized into oblivion by colonial tax collectors.
If you look into your own family history and encounter a sudden, bizarre shift in the spelling of an ancestor’s name, you aren’t looking at a simple clerical mistake.
Spanning nearly three centuries of displacement, warfare, and resilience, Unbowed tracks a grand historical mosaic across five distinct cultural lines. It features ordinary people caught in the violent machinery of changing empires:
Part I: A captive Scottish soldier from the English Civil War surviving a harrowing winter crossing as an indentured asset to a rigid Puritan iron works, his family is later tested by the paranoia of the Salem Witch Trials.
Part II: A family fractured by a sudden, brutal wilderness raid in Saratoga, navigating French captivity and cultural adoption inside Mohawk longhouses.
Part III: A Palatine German community torn right down the middle by the fierce, neighbor-versus-neighbor civil conflicts of the Revolutionary War.
Part IV: A bilingual French-Canadian veteran fights for his place on a shifting border, navigating the psychological scars of Civil War combat in la survivance of Cohoes and Troy.
Part V: An immigrant Irish drayman and his literate son fighting to protect their family from a deadly, volatile ballot-box riot in a gritty, industrializing America.
At its core, this volume is about the universal war over identity. In an expanding nation, institutional erasure didn’t always arrive with a bayonet—often, it arrived with an inkwell.
Consider the real historical journey of the German name Bohnenstiehl, filtered through a Dutch-speaking Albany minister before being reformed by English officials into Bonesteel. Or an Anglo-Irish Bushell, phoneticized into Barsell or Bouschel simply because local clerks had never heard it before.
Our ancestors did not survive by remaining rigid. They allowed their names to be rewritten so that their bloodlines could continue to write themselves. They traded the spelling of their past to purchase their future.
Whether your own roots trace back to the colonial frontier or you simply love a sweeping, high-stakes historical epic, Unbowed is a tribute to the unbroken chain of ordinary people who refused to bend.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing exclusive behind-the-scenes glimpses into the real archival discoveries that inspired these stories right here on the blog.
Thank you for reading, exploring, and reclaiming these voices with me.
Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life?
I studied French from junior high through first year undergraduate.
I can’t speak it. I tried, but my teacher (MA from Tunisia) had to use a book based on Parisien French, even though my hometown is a stone’s throw from Québéc (not Paris!).
After failing to learn how to speak French, I switched to German in second year college. Borrowed money to go to Germany for a month that summer and met long-lost relatives.
Kinda could speak German. Forgot how to do so after leaving college. Nobody to talk to (and no reason to use it).
In my MFA program, I got bored by the “creative writing workshops” (wherein my classmates enjoyed sniping each other’s works). So I took up Irish Gaelic. Borrowed money (again) to visit An Gaeltacht (Conamara) near Galway, Ireland.
Marginal fluency. For a year. Forgotten just as quickly.
Two years later, I moved to Japan. Studied Chinese characters and Japanese grammar on my own primarily, with help occasionally from a Japanese colleague where I taught and a Japanese friend I made who ran a private English cram school.
After over 26 years, by far my strongest “second” (fifth) language.
So. How has language learning affected my life?
How has it not?
I am a language teacher. I am also a failed language learner. This has made me acutely aware of how hard it is for my Japanese students of English to use English, when on a daily basis they really have no need to do so. I respect them to no end.
Learning another language is hard. It’s especially hard when there’s no real reason to do so, when there’s no one to talk to in that language.
When it’s not really a part of who you are, as a person.
I had thought that, given my ancestry, French, German, and Irish would be good to learn. Turned out that wasn’t enough. I needed a real reason.
Someone to talk to.
I am now married to the love of my life, a Japanese woman who, like me, loves learning and teaching language. We have two wonderful daughters who likewise enjoy learning language.
Because we have a reason to learn them. People.
It’s all about people. Language is people. Not translation software, not AI. People.
I feel as if I have two personalities, one which speaks English and one which speaks Japanese. The one which speaks English can never get past being a high school geek. The one which speaks Japanese cannot get past being a “strange foreigner.” The only time I feel comfortable now is when I am teaching. Only there can I be an actor and change who I am any time I want.
I wear glasses. I have worn glasses since I was in elementary school 2nd grade — the “aviator” style made of cheap plastic that I frequently broke during recess kickball games and then had to tape together so I could wear them.
I have never figured out how to keep my glasses clean in the subsequent four+ decades of my life.
But I seriously doubt this is “newsworthy.” Cringeworthy, maybe.
I saw a baseball game last September. That was live. Does that count?
Oh. Do you mean “live” in the Japanese sense, i.e., a live performance by a musical artist?
As in a live concert?
At a club?
Or just that the musicians were alive and actually wrote their own music and played their own instruments rather than danced around and lip-synced?
Yes. I am a snarky Gen-Xer. Wave the flannel.
(FWIW I think the last live musical performance I’ve seen was in a Japanese club in Osaka around 2000 or 2001, and before that in mid-1999 in a club somewhere in Boston. It’s hard to get out when you have a family and need to actually go to work in the morning.)
My middle name is actually Thomas. I chose to use “M Thomas” as a pen name out of respect for my father, who taught me how to write. As a professional communications writer, he was responsible for lots of public documents for the NYS DMV, including traffic safety reports, driver manuals, press releases from the Governor, all sorts of “my boss will feel the need to edit this, so I will deliberately leave behind something for him to do so as he doesn’t screw up the entire thing” document.
I may or may not have adopted this strategy in my own professional work (I certainly adopted the attitude…)
Another reason is because I had a baby brother named Thomas. He passed away before reaching five months old when I was not quite 11. It had a major impact on me as a child (and indeed as the adult and as the father I am).
I have no sons. It bothers me that I may be the last Thomas in our family. For a while, anyway.
