Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was one the eight persons convicted in the 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassination trial. This book is a biography of Dr. Mudd's wife, Sarah Frances Dyer.

Four of those convicted were executed. The other four, including Dr. Mudd, were incarcerated at the Fort Jefferson military prison located on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico, 70 miles west of Key West, Florida, and a thousand miles from Dr. Mudd's home in Maryland.

Sarah had lived a rather privileged life before the Lincoln assassination and all that followed. She grew up on a profitable Southern Maryland tobacco farm, attended a prestigious boarding school in Frederick, Maryland, married her childhood sweetheart, Sam Mudd, was living on a farm Sam's father gave the young couple as a wedding present, and had four healthy young children. Then John Wilkes Booth arrived.

In November 1864, Dr. Mudd was introduced to John Wilkes Booth at a local church service, and met him again in Washington, D.C. a month later. Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln a few months later during a theatre performance in Washington, D.C., and broke a leg while fleeing the theatre. He sought medical help from Dr. Mudd, who later falsely told those hunting Booth that he didn't recognize the man whose leg he treated was Booth. Convicted of conspiracy for harboring Booth, Dr. Mudd served almost four years in a military prison before being pardoned in 1869.

With the help of family members, Sarah managed to keep their farm going and raise their four young children while Dr. Mudd was in prison. After Sam returned home, they had five more children before he died in 1883. Sarah passed away in 1911.

This book tells the story of Sarah's life, from birth to death, including all the struggles she had keeping her family together while her husband was arrested tried, convicted, and imprisoned for involvement in the Lincoln assassination. It's the story of a young wife and mother who found strength she didn't know she had to survive terrible events that she could never have imagined would befall her.

Robert Summers has published two books. The first book, The Assassin's Doctor, is a biography of his great grandfather, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who provided medical assistance to John Wilkes Booth following the Lincoln assassination. Robert's earlier writings on Dr. Mudd have all been incorporated into The Assassin's Doctor.

Robert's mother was born and raised on the Mudd family farm where John Wilkes Booth sought medical help from Dr. Mudd after Booth had assassinated president Lincoln. Her father was Samuel Mudd II, a one year-old baby when Booth came to the farm. Her room growing up on the farm in the early 1900's was the same room Booth stayed in when he was there in 1865.

Dr. Mudd was not a subject of much discussion when Robert was growing up, despite many happy visits to the Mudd farm as a youngster. As an adult, he learned more about Dr. Mudd's involvement in the Lincoln assassination story, and decided to conduct additional research into Dr. Mudd's life. The Assassin's Doctor contains information about Dr. Mudd's life never reported before.

Robert's second book, Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers, is the story of Maryland's 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops. In addition to a history of the regiment's actions during the Civil War, the book includes short biographies of each of the thousand soldiers in the regiment. Anyone conducting genealogical research on these soldiers will find this information invaluable.

This large book was a ten year project, requiring the personal review of the soldiers' military and pension files at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. The regiment was organized and trained at Camp Stanton, only ten miles from Dr. Mudd's farm. Most of the soldiers were former slaves from farms in southern Maryland and the eastern shore of Maryland. Some had been slaves on Mudd family farms.