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Five Ways to Research Your Family History

May 7, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The writing of my historical novel Brookhaven took about 150 years.

I must have seen something like this before, but I can’t recall a specific example. Many novels include an acknowledgement page, cutting the people who helped or inspired the author. My historical novel Brookhaven has an author’s note explaining some of the novel’s background. But it also has something you don’t usually see in a novel – a nine-page bibliography.

I included more as a reminder to myself of where the novel come from.

A grandmother who referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” A father who told slightly mangled family stories, including one that sounded like an epic journey. A research paper in high school on what the “plantation system” really looked like. A family Bible with a mystery embedded in the birth and death records. A mountain of reading old and new American history books. An aunt who spent decades researching family history, long before the invention of the internet. Discovering I liked, as in really liked, the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longellow, once the top-selling poet and author in the United States who was dropped into the dustbin of literary criticism.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: A page from the records in the family Bible pre-preservation.

“The Burning Glow” by Luke H. Davis

May 6, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Cameron Ballack is back. And he’s traipsing all over where I used to bike.

Ballack is the fictional wheelchair-bound police detective created by St. Louis-based writer Luke H. Davis. In previous books (and there’s been a gap of some years), he and his team were based in St. Charles County, Missouri, part of metropolitan St. Louis. In his new outing, entitled The Burning Glow, Ballack is now the lead detective for the Special Investigating Department, which operates across the metro St. Louis region. (St. Louis actually does have something similar that operates across jurisdictional lines called the Major Case Squad.)

What Ballack and his team are pulled into is a car bombing in the part of the city of St. Louis known as “Little Bosnia,” home to numerous immigrants who fled the war in the 1990s. The victim is a teenager, who had arrived at a spot behind an apartment complex to show his friends a body in a dumpster. The friends run off; the teenager dies when he returns to his car. The teen was Bosnian and Muslim.

The next day, another car bombing occurs – one in the parking lot of a synagogue in west St. Louis County. A Jewish couple is killed. The male victim happened to be the business partner of the man whose body was in the dumpster. Then a third car bombing is narrowly avoided, when the intended victim, another Bosnian in south St. Louis, happens to step outside his home for a cigarette after midnight and notices someone checking underneath a car.

And from there, the mayhem gets even wilder. Ballack is racing not only to find the killer or killers but also to solve the crimes before the FBI arrives. It culminates in a wild chase across south St. Louis. (By this time, I’m yelling at Davis to leave Ted Drewes ice cream store alone.)

Davis tells a nail-biting story. He also gets the geography exactly right. I know because I’ve biked those very same streets, and biked them a lot, including those in Little Bosnia. And I’m still trying to recover from the scene at the intersection of Chippewa and Hampton.

Davis teaches at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis and chairs the Bible Department there. He’s also taught at schools in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia. He describes himself as “Presbyterian body, Lutheran heart, Anglican blood, Orthodox spirit,” all of which have served him well in writing the Cameron Ballack mysteries. He has published three Ballack mysteries, Litany of Secrets (2013), The Broken Cross (2015), and A Shattered Peace (2017), and Joel: The Merivalkan Chronicles Book 1 (2017). He blogs at For Grace and Kingdom.

So, Ballack is back, and his fans are thrilled. The Burning Glow takes the detective into new territory, deep into eastern European history and its transplant located in St. Louis. It’s a fast-paced, gripping tale, and here’s hoping we don’t have to wait long for the next one.

Reign: The Church in the Middle Ages by Luke H. Davis.

Reform: The Church at the Birth of Protestantism by Luke H. Davis.

Renewal: The Church That Expands Outward by Luke H. Davis.

Reading a Novel that Stars Your Hometown.

My review of Litany of Secrets.

My review of The Broken Cross.

My review of A Shattered Peace.

My review of Tough Issues, True Hope by Luke Davis.

Tides of Death by Luke H. Davis.

Island Games by Luke H. Davis.

The Christmas Solo – my new story at Cultivating Oaks Press

April 22, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I have a new story at Cultivating Oaks Press. Entitled “The Christmas Solo,” it’s a tale of a man floundering after a marriage disaster who finds his way back with a Christmas song.

It’s inspired by a song that has a short but strange history on YouTube, of all places. Early last October, a suggested video showed up on my YouTube page. Because it used a photo of the singer Josh Groban, I thought it was a new song by him. It was called “Light of Heaven,” and after listening to it a couple of times, I realized it sounded like Groban singing but wasn’t. Then I ask myself, what is this? Something done with an AI program? Identity theft? But if it was on YouTube, shouldn’t it have been vetted or approved with a new channel?

There were a number of similar videos, most using Groban’s picture and the voice sounding like Groban’s, but not quite his. A few other videos used other well-known singers like Rihanna.

But I liked “Light of Heaven.” I’d listen to it while I did my periodic walks. Slowly, as I listened, a story began to shape itself in my mind. A song about the Nativity could become a way of redemption for a broken man.

That’s the story I wrote for Cultivating Oaks Press.

I had continued to listen to “Light of Heaven” on YouTube until this past weekend. It was still available on Saturday. On Sunday, clicking on the link brought this message: “Video unavailable. This video has been removed due to a contractual obligation with a music licensor.” Not only had the video vanished, but its channel, along with all the other songs, was gone as well.

It’s a story based on a song that became a ghost. All that’s really left of the song is this story.

Photograph by Tom Allport via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Brookhaven” and the Battle of Shiloh

April 15, 2026 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

For a very long time, no one in my father’s family – father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins – knew why the family Bible contained a death notice. The name was Jarvis Seale; the only thing the listing had was the date of his death. Who was this person? Why was he considered so important that my great-grandfather, who’d penned every entry in the records, had included him. My father guessed Jarvis might have been a distant cousin, or a close friend.

It was only in the years I’d been doing reading and research for my historical novel Brookhaven that I discovered the answer, and then it was simply by happenstance. The key was the date of his death.

I was reading about the two-day Battle of Shiloh, and something about the dates – April 6 and April 7 of 1862 – reminded me of something. The dates were familiar, but in some other context. Where else had I seen those dates? At some point, I made the connection. It was the family Bible, and the mention of the mystery man. His death was listed as April 6, 1862.

I turned to Family Search. I pulled up my great-grandfather’s listing and checked his sisters. And there he was – the husband of an older sister, Martha. The had had five children – a boy and four girls. Family mystery solved.

Last week, specifically April 6 and April 7, marked the 164^th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh. Up to that point in the Civil War, the war had something almost romantic. But over the course of those two days, the reality became apparent. This wasn’t some romantic story of dashing horsemen rattling their sabers. This amounted to almost wholesale slaughter – more than 23,000 men (both sides combined) died during those two days, and many more were injured. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed. The Union has emerged victorious but had almost lost the battle on the first day. General Ulysses S. Grant was vilified in the northern press. The Union had won, but the cost was horrific.

*Shiloh National Military Park one of the Confederate mass graves*.

The Confederate dead – more than 10,000 – were heaped into nine mass graves. The Union dead were given individual graves. One of those mass graves contained the body of Jarvis Seale. As I was writing Brookhaven, it wasn’t difficult to image the grief of Jarvis’s widow and five children. Not only had they lost a husband and a father, they would also never know which mass grave contained his body. One daughter later married and moved to northern Texas. In the local cemetery, she had a memorial stone erected in her father’s memory. It’s why Find-A Grave identifies the cemetery as his burial site, but it’s only a memorial, not a grave.

The Battle of Shiloh eventually played a role in the birth of Decoration Day, which eventually was named Memorial Day. in 1866, women from the former Confederacy decorated the mass graves at Shiloh with floral tributes to the dead. Unexpectedly, they also decorated the graves of the Union dead. Northern women took notice and soon duplicated the practice at the sites of battles in northern states. Foes in life had joined together in death.

Related:

A flood of memories: How rising water imperiled Shiloh wounded – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

A Street Named Terpsichore

March 11, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A flat tire introduced me

to the sirens and their mother.

Before I knew Terpsichore

as a muse or the mother of sirens,

I knew her as a street, relatively

residential, nineteenth century

homes, called shotgun houses,

stringing each room in succession,

front to back, because properties

were taxed on width, not depth.

Imagine a street of homes,

sometimes duplexes, with

living room-bedroom-bathroom-

bedroom-dining room-kitchen-

back porch, a long house shaped

the like barrel of a shotgun.

Terpsichore had sister streets, all

comprising the Faubourg Lafayette

and Lower Garden District of

the Big Easy. You walked streets

named Erato, Calliope, Clio,

Thalia, Melpomene, Euterpe,

Polymnia, and Urania, and

Terpsichore (of course),collectively

issuing their siren calls to come

home. My personal favorite was

Erato, named for the poetry muse,

because I had a flat tire in a station

wagon on the interstate right

at the St. Charles Avenue exit,

and I guided our car full of teenagers

bound for the French Quarter down

the exit ramp, carefully, parking

on a street named Erato. I fixed

the flat, not knowing that decades

later, that Erato and her mother

Terpsichore would remind me

of a flat tire.

Tweetspeak Poetry has a prompt this week, involving the muses and their siren songs.

Photograph: A shotgun duplex on Terpsichore Street in New Orleans.

When I Discovered Latin American Literature

February 25, 2026 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously.

When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.

I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.

We started with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then we turned to a Peruvian writer, Vargas Llosa. The book we read was The Green House, which I found myself fascinated by. A few weeks later, I was in Kansas City for a conference related to work, and one night I found myself in a bookstore, where I spotted Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. I was more than fascinated; it’s an incredible story based on historical fact, an Amazonian rebellion in Brazil.

That same fall, our professor hosted Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa for campus visits and speeches. Our class got to see both writers up close and personal. By 1986, the writers, who both had started out on the political left, had diverged. Garcia Marquez remained on the left. Vargas Llosa had moved to a more conservative position; he would later run for president of Peru. (He lost.)

Our research paper for the course involved a literary analysis of any Latin American novel. We had a considerable number of writers and works to choose from. For some unknown reason, I decided to tackle Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral. It’s likely his most difficult and least accessible work. It’s a big story – 600+ pages. Set in Peru in the 1950s, it’s a story of people and relationships set against the dictatorship of the time.

I read the first 125 pages and thought I would die if I had to finish it. The most pressing problem was that I couldn’t follow it. Was this one story? Four stories? It seemed to move all over the place. I almost gave it up to work on another book when something clicked. I remembered how deeply structured Vargas Llosa’s books are. I knew if I could figure out the structure, I might grasp the novel.

I did, finally. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe how obvious it was.

We had to present our papers in class. When I finished my presentation, the professor smiled. “You got it,” he said. “You got exactly what this book is about.”

I still rate it as one of the most difficult books I’ve read. I also rate as one of the best books I’ve read. Once you figure out the structure, it’s an amazing story. (I think Vargas Llosa, like many of the Latin American “Magic Realism” authors, tried to out-Faulkner William Faulkner; Faulkner was certainly a major influence on them.)

The books Vargas Llosa published after Conversation in the Cathedral were almost all generally shorter. He definitely wrote shorter books as he got older. This new one is 246 pages.

He changed my understanding of literature. He showed what imagination could do. The structure of my novel Brookhaven, if not a literal descendant of Conversation in the Cathedral, was certainly influenced by it.

Yeah, I’m a fan.

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