Two years ago I purchased a fancy microfilm reader.  Here it is, sitting on a table in the back of my office:

And here is the microfilm collection I planned to work on transcribing, tucked away in a corner of my office:

When Raymond Reddick began going through his grandmother’s attic after she passed away in 1985, he stopped to look through a box of pictures. Inside were photographs of his family members going back several generations.

For Reddick, it was just the beginning of an investigation into his family’s history that would take him from Boston to Connecticut to Chicago, and finally to a grave in Dorchester’s Cedar Grove cemetery. His imagination fired by the photographs, Reddick immediately wondered how he could match names to the unidentified faces.

“I decided to take advantage of all of the older relatives who were still alive at the time, in their nineties,” Reddick said.

His relatives were able to identify many of the subjects in the photos, and from there Reddick was able to construct a rudimentary lineage. Read more . . .

Pembroke Pines, FL, August 13, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Historical Biographer/ Autobiographer Marilyn R. Hill-Sutton today announced the release of The Knight Family Legacy: One Family’s Story published by Outskirts Press. This remarkable true-life story tells the tale of Major John Knight Jr. - a White plantation owner, attorney, and decorated Confederate Civil War veteran and reveals the Knight family’s slave-owning history; Major John Knight’s valor during the Civil War; the forbidden union between him and his mulatto slave, Violet Knight; his decision to leave his estate to Violet and their children; an unprecedented court battle for control of the Knight estate by heirs; and son Jacob C. Knight’s courageous efforts to ensure his father’s deathbed wishes were carried out.

Author Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Roots: The Saga of an American Family sparked a surge of interest in genealogy in the 1970s, is the subject of a new museum opening today.

The Alex Haley House Museum and Interpretive Center is in tiny Henning, Tenn., 45 minutes north of Memphis, and includes the 10-room bungalow that was home to his grandparents, along with a new $1.2 million interpretive center where, fittingly, visitors can research their own roots.

The 1919 house where Haley spent many boyhood summers (and where he's now buried), has been open for tours in the past, but the interpretive center contains personal artifacts, such as the Emmy Haley won for the 1977 Roots miniseries, and more family memorabilia. Read more . . .