T. P. Bartlett writes about the cost of silence.
The Union Trilogy started with a house, not a country. A family where people stopped speaking to each other, and then could not remember how to start again, and then stopped noticing they had stopped. Ask any two of them why and you get two different answers. Nothing in that house was ever settled by argument. It was settled by absence. The country in these books breaks the same way and for the same reason.
Divided Houses is the first novel. Silent Tables and Open Doors follow.
Bartlett is a pen name and writes from North Georgia. A book about people who stopped seeing each other as anything but a side should not hand the reader one more thing to sort by. These books do not take a side. They take both seriously and go looking for the way through, the one that does not end with a winner and a loser. When Americans cannot sit down and solve a problem together, everybody loses.
The name comes from an ancestor who landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
They settled it, argued about it, and buried each other here.
Richard Bartlett was born at Ernley in Sussex in 1575 and the records give his trade as a shoemaker. He was sixty years old when he sailed. That is not an age at which a man leaves for opportunity.
England in 1635 had gone six years without a Parliament. Charles I was raising money without one, and William Laud, made Archbishop of Canterbury two years earlier, was running the church by inspection, silencing ministers who would not conform and prosecuting the ones who argued. Sussex was inside the reach of it. Whole congregations left in those years, by the shipload, and Newbury on the Parker River was founded the same year Richard got there.
The name reached this family through Sarah Bartlett Allen, born 1885, who carried it as a middle name into the DeLoach family and passed it no further.
Richard was also the great-great-grandfather of Josiah Bartlett, who signed the Declaration of Independence second and cast the first vote for the Articles of Confederation. Josiah descends from Richard through his son Richard. This line descends through his son John. Third cousin, nine times removed.
“The time is now at hand when we shall see whether America has virtue enough to be free or not.”
In a letter written just before independence.
“Of all the vices incident to man, lying is the most mean, most contemptible; it evinces a very weak, depraved heart, which shrinks at the exposure of motives and of actions.”
Also attributed to Bartlett.
A year after Newbury, Thomas Angell landed at Providence with Roger Williams and was named an original proprietor of the settlement. Massachusetts expelled Williams for holding that civil authority has no jurisdiction over conscience.
Michael Crepin Desloges was born in 1625 at Loges, in the Cher, in a France that was running out of room for Protestants. His son reached Isle of Wight County, Virginia, by 1680. The name became DeLoach on the way to Tennessee.
The paternal side are Armenians of New Julfa, in Isfahan, the quarter built by the people who walked there after Julfa was given three days to evacuate and then burned, in 1604. Gaspar Minasian, born 1784, was Governor of Vastikan Village. So was his son. Those are the only public offices anyone in this tree has ever held.
Six direct ancestors appear in DAR lineage books. One of them, George Adam Gardner, born 1740, is also in the Pennsylvania State Archives.
Four hundred years is a long time for a family to keep disagreeing and stay at the table.
Contact: tp@tpbartlett.com
Questions readers ask
Who is T. P. Bartlett?
T. P. Bartlett is the pen name of an American novelist who writes from North Georgia and is the author of the Union Trilogy. The name is carried from an ancestor who landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635.
Why write under a pen name?
Because a book about people who stopped seeing each other as anything but a side should not hand the reader one more thing to sort by. These books do not take a side, and a byline should not suggest one.
When is the next book?
Silent Tables, Book Two of the Union Trilogy, is being written. It has no release date. The mailing list finds out the day it is finished.
Does T. P. Bartlett visit book clubs?
Yes. In person if the group wants that, by call, or by written answers to whatever the group wants to ask, under the pen name, which is the only name the author uses. The discussion guide is free on this site, seventeen questions, with the last five marked for a group that has finished the book.
How do I contact T. P. Bartlett?
Interview requests, review copies and rights go through the contact page. Reader mail is read, and answered when it can be.