Roots Author

Alex Haley, the author of the best seller "Roots", described how he spent 12 years uncovering his family genealogy yesterday at Emerson Hall.

Starting with fragmentary accounts of an African slave ancestor and a few African words which had been passed down to him through generations of family storytelling, Haley traced his lineage to a village in Gambia.

During this search, Haley made several trips to Africa and eventually interviewed a village story teller who described the disappearance of Haley's African ancestor. The ancestor had been kidnapped by slave traders in the middle of the 19th century.

After he found one of his ancestors listed in an 1870 census later that day, he said it "just absolutely grabbed me." He explained, "I'm obviously obsessed. You must be obsessed to write this kind of book."