Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – Genealogy Books

“Hey genea-bodies – it’s Saturday Night – time for more Genealogy Fun!!!”, says Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings! Here is his challenge for this Saturday:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to: Find the last genealogy book that you read cover-to-cover. Write a complete source citation, and transcribe the first paragraph of the Introduction. Here is my submission:

Melvin J. Collier, Mississippi to Africa (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, Inc., 2010), http://www.mississippitoafrica.com.

This was a library book I have returned, but he has a great website that included an excerpt from the Intro I will use:

INTRODUCTION Excerpt

“If we stand tall, it is because we stand on the shoulders of many ancestors.”
African (Yoruba) proverb

“He was a slave.” Those words uttered from Grandma’s lips and into the ears of her curious grandson. My paternal grandmother, the late Mrs. Willie Ealy Collier, had just gotten off the telephone with her first cousin. Like many of my childhood days, that day I was spending time with my grandparents, and I quietly eavesdropped on her telephone conversation with “Cut’n Dunk” Ealy. They were conversing about their paternal grandfather, Robert “Big Bob” Ealy of Leake County, Mississippi. I overheard statements like, “Grandpa Bob was something else!,” “Grandpa had over thirty children,” and “Grandma Jane was this . . . and Grandma Jane was that . . .” Never before had I heard my grandmother talk about her grandparents. After anxiously waiting for her telephone conversation to end, I bombarded her with questions. I wanted to know about the subject of her conversation.

I learned so much from reading this book and found several surnames of friends I had been working on that had ancestors that lived in Melvin’s ancestor’s community. Very exciting to see how his mind worked as he discovered new documents and went forward. I highly recommend this book. Even if you do not have African American ancestry, the tips he give and way he research makes this book a worthwhile read!

To learn more about this book and where you can purchase it, visit Melvin J. Collier’s website, Mississippi to Africa!

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