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.
You are looking at a collision of worlds.
I am incredibly proud to announce the upcoming release of my new historical fiction volume,
UNBOWED: Five Generations of Captivity, Rebellion, and Survival.
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.
Unbowed will officially launch on Thanksgiving Day, 2026.
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.
Completely unbowed,
M. Thomas Apple
mthomasapple.com
One thing I have struggled with while uncovering my family’s complicated past is the lack of consistency in naming conventions before the digital age.
While visiting Montreal and Upstate New York for summer vacation, my family were greeted by an unhappy surprise.
M Thomas Apple Author Page 