That was the title of one of my favorite Emmy-winning television shows produced by Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky. In it, each week, a different celebrity would go on a search to trace their family tree. With the help of historians and experts, they traveled across states, and often countries, discovering almost unbelievable real-life stories hidden in their families’ past and unlocking long-held mysteries.
Another favorite ancestry program is “Finding Your Roots,” with historian, professor, author, critic, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr, who uses tools of cutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research to go back in time to his prominent guests’ ancestors. Then, as he takes them through their Book of Life the show has created for them, they learn incredible stories and discover mysteries and family secrets. Tears are often shed. On the screen and by me, watching at home.
I can’t remember my father. He deserted my mother when I was a toddler. Over the years, I’d hear stories about how, when they were very young, they’d driven across the country from Brooklyn to Los Angeles so they could both study at the famed Pasadena Playhouse. (Perhaps that ability to dream big is where seven-year-old me, growing up in a remote Oregon ranching and timber town, had the audacity to decide to be an author when I grew up.) One story had him playing semi-pro football in California. Which, as the country song goes, would’ve been semi-pro and semi-pay.
Every so often, I’d consider hiring a private detective to find him but never followed through. Then along came the Internet and I thought about it again but didn’t know if I wanted to open old wounds. Eventually, I Googled his name and found a photo of his grave. Perhaps I should have left it at that. But the obituary listed the names of his daughters.
Years passed. Then one day on a whim, while posting on my Facebook page, I decided to look up the sisters’ names. And there, I believed I’d found one. So, I messaged her and asked if she knew… (I’m not revealing his name for her family’s privacy.) She immediately wrote back, “Yes! He was my father! Did you know him?”
Huh. I thought for a few moments, then decided, well, I’d known about her and had even seen photos that my father’s father, who’d visited our home, had left behind. So, believing that she knew about me, I answered, “Yes, he was my father, too.”
Silence…For days. Then, finally, I learned that he’d —oops!—forgotten to mention to his daughters that he’d had an earlier family. When she asked her mother if her dad had been married before, she learned that he had. When she asked why they hadn’t told her, the response was “It never came up.” Unfortunately, her sister had died too young, so I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there’s also at least one brother somewhere out there in California.
That was the first stirrings of a story idea about three sisters, all of who had the same father but different mothers. The eldest, Tess, knew about the second daughter. But not the third. The middle daughter, Charlotte, had been kept totally in the dark. The youngest, Natalie, knew about both the others. And they each learn, over a two-day period, that their father died, leaving them a famous winery.
I wanted this story to be about more than three sisters. From the very beginning, I knew it was about three daughters. Because each had had a very different experience with their father, which informed their feelings about him. But as he (and I) looked back on his life, while he deeply regretted his actions, despite being a very flawed parent, he’d been a compassionate man who’d developed PTSD and survivor guilt from witnessing too much suffering in his long career as a conflict photographer.
Tess and Charlotte also discover they have a grandmother who was a member of the French Resistance. As they learn her story, and that of their American WWII pilot grandfather, the sisters begin to put aside differences and rivalries and come to realize that their true inheritance isn’t the Oregon winery, but a rich family history of strength, bravery, and perseverance. And that families can be forged, not solely by blood, but by choice, personal bonds, and love.
I’ve always written about families because I can relate to the need to know what connects us all together. From watching so many episodes of those television shows, I also suspect that all families, somewhere in their ancestry, have secrets that have been kept for years. Decades. Perhaps even centuries. But even though some of those stories may be painful, they are part of our legacy and I believe that at the end of the day, we all want to know who we really are.
Which brings me to my question: Have you ever learned of a secret or something surprising about your family’s past?
Publication Date: September 7, 2021
“Moving… This engrossing and hopeful story will hold readers from start to finish.”—Publishers Weekly
“Family secrets, complex characters and a glorious setting make The Inheritance a rich, compelling read…JoAnn Ross at her best!” —Sherryl Woods, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sweet Magnolias series
With a dramatic wartime love story woven through, JoAnn Ross’s brilliant new novel is a gorgeous generational saga about the rivalry, history and loyalty that bond sisters together
When conflict photographer Jackson Swann dies, he leaves behind a conflict of his own making when his three daughters, each born to a different mother, discover that they’re now responsible for the family’s Oregon vineyard—and for a family they didn’t ask for.
After a successful career as a child TV star, Tess is, for the first time, suffering from a serious identity crisis, and grieving for the absent father she’s resented all her life.
Charlotte, brought up to be a proper Southern wife, gave up her own career to support her husband’s political ambitions. On the worst day of her life, she discovers her beloved father has died, she has two sisters she never knew about and her husband has fallen in love with another woman.
Natalie, daughter of Jack’s longtime mistress, has always known about her half sisters, and has dreaded the day when Tess and Charlotte find out she’s the daughter their father kept.
As the sisters reluctantly gather at the vineyard, they’re soon enchanted by the Swann family matriarch and namesake of Maison de Madeleine wines, whose stories of bravery in WWII France and love for a wounded American soldier will reveal the family legacy they’ve each inherited and change the course of all their lives.
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New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author JoAnn Ross has been published in twenty-seven countries. The author of over 100 novels, JoAnn lives with her husband and many rescue pets — who pretty much rule the house — in Oregon. Visit her on the web at www.joannross.com.
