This family saga opens as Daniel Giraud, a Huguenot, escapes the French king’s clutches in the1690’s, in the southwest of France. Fleeing to New York City; he, his wife, and small child seek safety and religious freedom. The family joins with other Huguenots in New Rochelle on Long Island Sound.
Now grown, his son persuades him to move north in Westchester County to become a tenant-farmer of the land-owning Van Cortlandt family. Hard work is eventually followed by prosperity.
Years later, the grandson and inheritor, Daniel Gerow, serves in the Westchester militia in both the French and Indian War and in the American Revolution. Life for Daniel and his family becomes one of chance and fate as Cortlandt Manor becomes a nucleus for both Revolutionaries and the British Army. Gerow family members perish or are exiled in the conflict.
The author weaves fact and fiction as she traces her family’s history as tensions rise through the intricacies of deceit, loyalty, and dangers of the American Revolution.