Author Martha Rogers shares with us the truly fascinating story behind her book Love Stays True. She has quite the interesting family background. To help us get in the holiday spirit, she’s giving away a copy of her book Christmas at Holly Hill. Read the post, and when you get to the bottom, you’ll see instructions on how to enter.

Thanks for joining us, Martha. Tell us a little bit about how the book Love Stays True came to be.

A number of years ago, my father gave me a packet of letters belonging to my great-grandmother Sarah Louise Dyer Whiteman. Those letters sparked my interest in genealogy and led to this story. In my family research I found wills, marriage licenses, baptismal records, death records, and books with information about the Whiteman and Dyer family line. Other information about them came from my grandfather and great-aunt Alice’s memories of their parents and from parts of a journal from that time. Although this story is loosely based on the love story of Sarah Louise Dyer and Manfred MacDaniel Whiteman, many incidents taken from letters and notes from journals have been expanded and fictionalized to complete the story. Real names have been used for many of the characters.

Sally Dyer and Manfred Whiteman met in St. Francisville, Louisiana, when she visited her grandparents there. I am not sure of their ages at the time, but I do know it was before the war, and that Manfred had shown affection for Sally just prior to his leaving to join the Confederate Army in 1861. In a letter, Manfred mentions seeing her before he left to rejoin his regiment in the summer of 1864. I used an excerpt of that letter in the story as the one he sends to Sally to declare his love for her. The wedding ring Manfred had made from a twenty-dollar gold piece is still in the family. It was passed down to their youngest son, Thomas Dyer, and has been used in several wedding ceremonies of family members since then.

Manfred’s father, John Whiteman, owned a shipping company at Bayou Sara on the Mississippi River down the hill from St. Francisville, Louisiana. I’ve been down to the river which now covers the old settlement of Bayou Sara and found a map of the former town and the location of the company. Both black and white men helped load the ships coming into the port at Bayou Sara, but none of the documents showed any slaves being owned by the shipping company.

Manfred came from a family of five boys. His brother Henry came home from the POW camp with snow-white hair and died a little over a year later. His story has been passed down through the generations. Although Manfred moved to Texas, his remaining three brothers stayed in the St. Francisville area, married, and had families. Most of them are buried at Grace Church in St. Francisville.

Sally’s father, Thomas Dyer, was a cotton merchant in Woodville, Mississippi, about twenty-five miles north of St. Francisville. As a businessman, Thomas Dyer used hired hands to handle the cotton sales. I found one of his letters to Sally when she went to finishing school in New Orleans before the war; it reveals that he regarded women with high esteem and he wished her well in her endeavors to become whatever she chose in life. Sally’s maternal grandfather was known as Judge Woodruff, so I assumed he must have been a lawyer. None of Sally’s family owned slaves at the time of the war. Sally’s grandmother, Mary Woodruff, had two housekeepers, and from their ages I assumed they were sisters, but I made them mother and daughter in the story and put them in Sally’s household.

In this story, I have included real towns and actual events from the war, such as the attacks on Grace Episcopal Church during the battle of Port Hudson in 1863; the day the war stopped for a Masonic burial at that church on June 12, 1863; Susan Allen putting out fires to save the covered bridge in Marion, Virginia, in December 1864; and the deplorable conditions at the prisoner of war camp in Point Lookout, Maryland.

Manfred returned to St. Francisville from Point Lookout with his brother Edwin in June of 1865 and married Sally that same June. He became a doctor and stayed in Louisiana until 1880, when he moved to Texas with his family to practice medicine in Victoria, Texas. That move became a part of the tree that formed the future and led to my being a fifth-generation Texan after my grandfather Tom married a young woman whose parents and grandparents were Texans. What I’ve learned about them and the Texas Revolution may well lead to another series.

Thank you, Martha. We’d love to see a series about the Texas Revolution!

Martha Rogers is a freelance author of both fiction and non-fiction and a speaker. Her stories and articles have appeared in a number of compilations and magazines. Her first fiction novella released in 2007.

Her experiences as a public school teacher, Sunday school teacher, youth leader, First Place leader, Mom and Grandmother give Martha a unique field of ministry.

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