Novelist Natalie Danford has written her first novel, a psych-thriller, about secret family histories. In an interview on Nextbook, she talks a little about her own family.

My paternal grandfather created this whole story that he had come over here when he was 12 and that he didn’t speak any English and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Many years ago, after the Ellis Island records went online, my father idly punched in his own father’s name and it turns out that my grandfather came here when he was three with his entire family. He had come from Austria and the family name was Deutsche. Later he changed our name to Danford. My father asked a relative about it. It turns out in reality that my grandfather was part of a blended family. His mother died when he was an infant. His father, a widower, had remarried and between the two of them they had something like 15 children together.

It’s not the story that was so important as the idea that there was this family member who was not honest about his own past.

On my mother’s side, we always thought that my great-grandfather left Russia because he didn’t want to be conscripted into the Czar’s army, obviously a pretty bad deal if you were Jewish. One of my mother’s cousins did genealogical research in the late 1970s; it turned out that he actually killed somebody and hopped a boat.

Her novel, Inheritance, was released early this year.