When his father dies, and his older brother inherits the family’s homestead in Stogumber, England, William becomes an easy target for recruiters of skilled workers for the newly chartered Massachusetts Bay Colony in America. A devout Puritan (and political outcast in 1640), of marriageable age but landless, he faces conscription for a looming civil war. The colonies promise land grants and a Godly Puritan community. Believing it’s God’s will, William leaps at the chance to be counted and belong. He bounds a ship for Boston, Massachusetts with his inheritance, a bit of cash, his father’s loom, and two spinning wheels. Twenty-four years later, the year his tenth child is born, he must admit his mistake. Although he’s reaped the bounty of God’s providence tenfold, the political winds turn, the Indians become enemies, and his children leave the faith. What he’d fled in England has followed him to New England. William, The Patriarch by Nancy Shattuck is the first book of The Watertown Chronicles, fictional accounts of a real family that lived through the turbulent and devastating King Philip’s Indian War in 1675-1676.