NEW STEW: Watch May Episode Of WCTV’s ‘Book Stew’ Featuring Author Sandra Freels

Below is an announcement from Wilmington Community Television’s “Book Stew:”

When Sandra Freels, a scholar of Russian and Slavic languages, leaped into the rabbit hole of amateur genealogy, she never expected to pull out Dutch ancestors from 1630s New Netherland and the New Amsterdam settlement of Lower Manhattan. Discovering that she was the 10th + granddaughter of Anneke Jans, and that Anneke had dealings (not always positive – as Sandra says, “Perhaps I did him a disservice”) with Peter Stuyvesant, inspired Sandra to write the historical fiction novel Anneke Jans and the New World.

The historical fiction genre is more frequently much more fiction than historical, especially when showing and telling events of 400 years prior, but Anneke, mother of ten, wife to two husbands, emerges as a controversial figure when her heirs engage in a massive battle for money and property in the Old and New Worlds, one which actually made the front page of the New York Times in 1927.

In Anneke’s world, the Dutch West India Company is all-powerful, and Anneke surely would have known enslaved Africans brought to the colony to and from the Caribbean. And as Sandra discovers, Anneke’s move to the Albany area brings about friendship with her Mohican neighbors, and one of her daughters becomes an interpreter.

Anneke’s remarkable life and times are well-imagined by author Freels. Click on the links below and enjoy!

YouTube video: https://tinyurl.com/bookstew149-yt

Soundcloud podcast: https://tinyurl.com/bookstew149-sc

Eileen MacDougall is the host/producer of 145+ episodes of Book Stew, a web series and podcast originating in 2013, featuring every variety of authors, illustrators, poets, and playwrights, plus a cat that survived a tornado and lived to write about it!

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