Welcome to the Now Old Better Show. I'm host Paul Vogel-Sang and this is episode number

187 part one of a two-part series.

Our guest over the next two episodes is writer, historian, filmmaker, and genealogist Regina Mason.

This will be a wonderful conversation, so thanks for joining us today.

Today's show is a great one. Again, our guest Regina Mason is a well known international speaker, author, executive producer, and storyteller who believes in the extraordinary will of the human spirit.

Regina Mason has spent 15 years researching the life and times of her great, great, grandfather,

pioneering fugitive slave autobiography, William Grimes.

She has spent nearly a lifetime turning a negative into a positive that would one day culminate

with a new edition of her ancestor's book,

The Life of William Grimes, the runaway slave.

As I delved into William Grimes' autobiography,

the language astonished me.

Yet up to that point point I had no idea that the author was

my ancestor.

He sums up his life story in the preface of his

history, he would inform them that he is now living in Litchfield,

Connecticut, that he is about 40 years of age age that he is married to a black woman

and passes for a Negro though three parts white that he was born in a place of

Virginia had lived in several different states, and had been owned by 10 different

masters.

That about 10 years since he ran away and came to Connecticut where, after six years, he was recognized by some of his former

master's friends taken up and compelled to purchase his freedom with the sacrifice of

...