Built upon dramatic historical discoveries that move full circle from the Dark Ages and medieval Europe to present-day America, the authors begin this intriguing work with an incident in the Sonoran Desert in the late 1990s, seemingly unrelated but yielding a surprising clue to their unknown ancestry. Thinking that the Nichols family stemmed from only a simple Scottish fisherman who emigrated to Cape Cod in the eighteenth century, the couple didn't know of the true family heritage as descendants of a Roman senator and of many royals, including the Emperor Charlemagne and a long line of Frankish kings who ruled one of the largest kingdoms in post-Roman Europe.

As the Nichols traced their family line from the sixth century to the twentieth, they also discovered their relation to Robert the Bruce, the great fourteenth-century king of Scotland, and to the Knights Templar, who secretly fought for Bruce. The order transformed from a military order that protected Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land to fugitives from society for alleged corruption and heresy. Some escaped execution and fled to Portugal, where they were absorbed into the Order of Christ in 1319. The Freemasonry movement began in the fifteenth century and survives to this day, incorporating some rituals and symbols of the Knights Templar. Discoveries of ancient cross symbols in mining regions of America's southwest strongly indicate that Templars (or perhaps their adherents) may have had a pre-Columbian presence here.

Fans of genealogy and of discovering one's roots amid the vast tumult of world history will enjoy this brief yet relevant dive into the authors' family tree. Their intriguing family biography whets the appetite, leaving the reader wanting more. The abundance of historical surprises in the Nichols narrative may also inspire others to research their own family trees.

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