Take a Fascinating Look at Family Legacies—What Will Yours Be?

Posted on Jun 20, 2017 Topic : Fiction

We caught up with bestselling fiction authors Mindy Starns Clark and Leslie Gould to discuss their latest release, My Daughter's Legacy, the third and final installment in their Cousins of the Dove trilogy, a unique series that features a modern-day mystery plot interwoven with a historical story line. The trilogy tells the rich history of the Talbot family through three different centuries and how that legacy impacts their present-day descendants who struggle to solve a brutal crime they witnessed as children.

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What kind of research did you do for My Daughter’s Legacy?

(Leslie) My husband, Peter, and I met up with Mindy and her husband, John, in Richmond for a really fun research trip. While there, we spent a lot of time in museums, walking through neighborhoods, and imagining what life was like in Richmond in 1864-65. I also did extensive reading about the Civil War in general, life in Richmond in the nineteenth century in particular, Confederate hospitals, the lives of African-Americans in Virginia, the issue of slavery, and Abolitionism, along with lots of other topics. Every bit of the research was fascinating—the hard part was stopping and starting to write, although the research really continues through the entire writing and editing process.

What was the most surprising thing you found while researching?

(Mindy) I had a wonderful surprise when I was doing research on photography and ran across the fact that one of the early innovators/inventors of photography was a man named Talbot, which is the fictional family name of our main characters. Better yet, his contributions to the science of photography involved printing on paper, a radical departure from previously-used surfaces such as glass or tin, and papermaking just happens to be the fictional family business of the Talbots in our story. It was just a wild coincidence, but thanks to his last name, the real Henry Fox Talbot gets several mentions in the story and is identified as a “distant cousin” of our fictional characters. Fun! I love it when fiction and reality collide.

What would you say the message of My Daughter’s Legacy is?

(Leslie and Mindy) The choices we make in life impact future generations. Being courageous in our decisions, which in the story is simply doing the right thing, not only affects us, but our descendants as well.

What did you learn while writing these books that can be applied to your own life?

(Leslie) Writing these novels reinforced, in my mind, how important it is for us to tell our own family stories. As I wrote, I continually thought of my own ancestors. One branch settled in what is now North Carolina before the Revolutionary War. One branch arrived in San Francisco on the day President Lincoln died. And another branch left Switzerland, due to famine, in the early 1880s. All found great opportunity in the United States. Thankfully I descended from people who loved to tell stories and also write them down, stories that were a staple of my childhood and also now line my bookcase. They all set a wonderful example for me to follow.

(Mindy) I was reminded that the choices we make don’t just affect us, they can reverberate down through the generations. Writing this series made me think a lot about that, about what a legacy really is and what sort of legacy I want to leave behind. I love the Broadway musical Hamilton, and there’s a great line in it that says: “What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” Every time I think about the books in this series, I’m reminded that there’s still time to plant more seeds, God willing, before I’m done here on earth. I’ve always tried to be a faithful planter, but this series has made me far more mindful of my actions, decisions, and relationships and how those will impact my descendants.