How Adelaide The White Eagle began

I did not set out to write a story about a Polish princess who married into the Hungarian royal line. The idea arrived after years of tracing my mother’s side of the family and, later, after standing on Polish ground myself.
On that side I found the Scottish Drummonds who had lived in Madeira, linking the Scottish and Portuguese threads of my heritage. As the records continued, the line led through Hungary. There I discovered that a Hungarian prince named Michael had married a Polish woman—Adelaide, a princess of the Piast dynasty.
She was not a distant legend. In the tree I had been building, Adelaide of Poland (Adelajda ‘The White’ Piast) appears as the sister of Mieszko I and the daughter of Siemomysł (Ziemomysł) of the Piasts. She married Mihály of Hungary around the mid-tenth century. Their line continued through Vazul into the Árpád dynasty. The connection joined a Polish princess of the early Piast house to the Hungarian side of my ancestry.
I wanted to understand the world she came from, so I went to Poland. I walked the island of Ostrów Lednicki, the early Piast stronghold on Lake Lednica associated with the court of her brother Mieszko I. The ruins of the palatium and chapel are quiet now, but the island still carries the weight of that century. Standing there, I felt a clear sense of belonging—an unexpected recognition that these Polish roots were not only recorded in documents but present in the land itself. That feeling stayed with me.
Adelaide had crossed from that world into Hungary, carrying one culture into another. I wanted to imagine what it might have been like to be that young woman: rooted in the Piast landscape I had just walked, then moving into a new realm, with the eagle somehow part of the story. The visit made the connection personal. It turned a name on a family tree into a place I had touched.
That is why I wrote Adelaide the White Eagle. The book is fiction, but it grew from a real discovery and from the day I stood on Ostrów Lednicki and felt the Polish side of my ancestry under my feet. I wanted readers to meet her, and to sense the long thread that runs from that island through Hungary, through the Drummonds of Madeira, and into the present.
The story is my way of honouring that ancestor and the island that still holds her world.