The Welsh Connection

"It was on a Saturday morning, January fourteenth, in the year nineteen hundred and three when my family left our home in Stanleytown, 27 Upper Terrace, Rhondda Valley in South Wales, Great Britain, for our new home in Mountain Ash, Whitley County, Kentucky, United States of North America...."  Thus begins a 260-page, handwritten history of my father-in-law's family, written by his sister, who was twelve when they moved.  The account is rich in details of a Welsh coal-mining family's immigration.  Reading it from beginning to end, I began to create the protagonist of my first novel, The Welsh Harp.  Although she may share some characteristics with the writer of the history, she is her own person.  Since I knew only two members of the family briefly in their older years, none of the characters are meant to parallel real people.