You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.

It's always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.