Three days before Christmas in 1831, Frankie Silver killed her husband, Charles Silver, with an axe and burned his body in the fireplace. Author Perry Deane Young, whose ancestors were involved in the case, began collecting material about it as a teenager. As a college student, he was astounded to learn that most of what he had been told was actually false. Abused by her husband, Frankie killed in self defense. The laws of that time would not allow her to take the stand and explain what ha...

Forbidden Fruit is a collection of fascinating, largely untold tales of ordinary men and women who faced mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters, and bullets to be together**—**and defy a system that categorized blacks not only as servants, but as property.In the true love stories of Forbidden Fruit, you will meet sixteen couples who fought for love—love between slaves, between slaves and masters, and between slaves and...

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and t...

The extraordinary story of one couple’s determination to free themselves and their children from slavery and make a new life in CanadaPrior to abolition in 1865, as many as 40,000 men, women, and children made the perilous trip north from enslavement in the United States to freedom in Canada. Many were aided by networks that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. And the stories that emerge from the past about these journeys are truly remarkable.In A Shadow o...

In the tradition of Slaves in the Family, the provocative true account of the hanging of four black people by a white lynch mob in 1912—written by the great-granddaughter of the sheriff charged with protecting them.Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. For Karen...

Following up Betty DeRamus’s Essence bestselling Forbidden Fruit, Freedom by Any Means follows the story of extraordinary acts of courage and love by Blacks in the American slave era with beautifully written and inspiring stories of how slaves used the law**—against all odds—**to gain freedom for themselv...

Among the darkest corners of Kentucky's past are the grisly feuds that tore apart the hills of Eastern Kentucky from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. Now, from the tangled threads of conflicting testimony, John Ed Pearce, Kentucky's best known journalist, weaves engrossing accounts of six of the most notorious feuds to uncover what really happened and why. His story of those days of darkness brings to light new evidence, and questions commonly held beliefs about l...

An examination of the unsolved mystery of the Jack the Ripper-style serial killer who terrified early 20th century Atlanta, Georgia.As Atlanta finished rebuilding after the Civil War, a new horror arose from the ashes to roam the night streets. Beginning in 1911, a killer whose methods mimicked the famed Jack the Ripper murdered at least twenty black women, from prostitutes to working-class women and mothers. Each murder attributed to the killer occurred on a Satur...

Along Pond Creek Road is a look at the families making up the ancestry of Alda Buckley Kennedy. The stories cover the whole of American history: emigration to Williamsburg, a Protestant Rebellion in Maryland, the Revolutionary War, flatboating on the Ohio River and pioneering in log cabins, conflicts with Indians, the War of 1812, the Civil War, Abraham Lincolns wedding, etc. We are blessed to be able to know so much about our ancestors.

Charles Manson has been studied from many perspectives by authors, especially those that have looked closely at the mind control he has used to manipulate his followers. I have read with avid interest a number of these works over the years. My book begins with his birth certificate, which was difficult for researchers to gain access to because of the misspelling of his mother's surname. After recording various facts from this document, I branched out to find numerous facts from other ances...

The rugged character and indomitable spirit of the early pioneers of Stephen F. Austins Texas colony had their roots in a turbulent, distant past. From the early 1600s, their courageous ancestors had pushed westward, leaving the European shores to carve out a new nation from the wilderness. They fled religious and political oppression in search of a better life in which freedom was of supreme importance. Many came with tales of their former struggles in Londonderry, Ireland during the grea...

A genealogical study of the Soward and Tipsword families originally done by John Hubert Doty and updated by MaryAnn Doty Rizzo. Includes historical information and documentation. Pictures available separately from the author. These families have connections to Chief Cornstalk and Daniel Boone.