David's Musings About the Books

David's BLOG

July 1, 2026
Every story needs a starting point. For the Mellichamp family saga, I chose 1598, the year William Mellichamp was born in Toulouse, France.
That was not an accident. Europe in 1598 was a world in transition. The Renaissance had run its course. The printing press had been spreading ideas for 150 years. Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses to a church door back in 1517, and the fallout was still reshaping the continent. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in the streets, in the courts, and on the battlefield.
For a Protestant family living in Catholic-dominated southern France, 1598 was both hopeful and dangerous. The Edict of Nantes that year gave French Protestants (Huguenots) a measure of legal protection. But that protection was fragile and unevenly applied, and everyone knew it could be taken away.
William grew up in that world. He was born into a family that survived by being careful, staying quiet, and knowing who their friends were. He did not inherit his family's caution. That is what makes him interesting.
I wanted readers to understand the world in which William was born. It was already loaded with tension before he made his single mistake. His story did not begin with his own choices. It began with the century he was born.

June 15, 2026
I never set out to write a novel. I set out to find a man. When I was in college, I came across a description in a reference book about a fellow named Mellichamp who printed counterfeit South Carolina money, traveled to Georgia to buy crops, and sold them back in Charles-Town. The scheme nearly bankrupted the newly founded colony of Savannah. That paragraph stopped me cold. My mother was a Mellichamp. Who was this man? Where did he come from? What happened to him and to his family after him?
The essay sent me down a road I have never left. I started digging into genealogy records, history books, and anything I could find about the Mellichamp family line. What I found was not just one man but a whole chain of them, stretching back further than I expected, living through some of the most dramatic periods in history.
The more I found, the more I wanted to tell their story. Not as a dry genealogical record, but as a living narrative. Real people in real situations, reacting to actual events. People of the times in which they lived.
That is how Will the Circle Be Unbroken? was born. It began with a paragraph in a reference book and turned into the work of a lifetime. I hope you find it as fascinating as I have.