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A lot of us are curious about our roots. Here's a brief list of memoirs written by a few who researched and found them.
Clear Springs: A Family Story
Novelist Bobbie Ann Mason looks back on the history of her rural Kentucky family and their influence on both her life and her writing.
Hardcover: Random House, 1999
Paperback: Perennial, 2000
Finding Fish
Antwone Quenton Fisher was an abused foster child who found his biological family, wrote his story and sold it to the movies.
William Morrow & Co., 2001
Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Cartoonist Art Spiegelman's two-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel is about a son's attempts to understand his father and what he went through during the Holocaust.
Pantheon Books, 1993
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations
Freelance journalist Diane Armstrong begins her first book with the story of her grandfather and his then-controversial divorce. She ends the memoir with her own grandchildren, plotting the course of her Jewish family from 1890 to the present.
St. Martin's Press, 2001
O Come Ye Back to Ireland
Authors Niall Williams and Christine Breen chronicle their meeting in New York, their marriage, and their decision to leave the United States and return to Ireland to rediscover their roots. O Come Ye Back to Ireland is the first in a series of books about their lives in the Emerald Isle.
Sophia Books, 1989
Pearl's Secret: A Black Man's Search for His White Family
After black journalist Neil Henry learned that his great-great-grandfather had been an overseer on a Louisiana plantation, he began a 17-year odyssey to find his white relations. The things he discovered changed everyone's notions about the family's past.
University of California Press, 2001
Rain of Gold
Mexican American author Victor Villaseñor writes about three generations of his family and their struggles after emigrating to California in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.
Hardcover: Arte Publico Press, 1991
Paperback: Delta, 1992
Roots
Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative details two centuries of his family's history, beginning with an 18th-century ancestor's sale into slavery and ending with the story of the author's father. This classic family history started the genealogy craze, and it's still the book by which all other family chronicles are judged.
Doubleday, 1976
Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China
Feminist novelist Emily Prager journeys to China with her adopted child LuLu to help the little girl learn about her roots.
Random House, 2001
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