This is the Baymaw podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we are joined by special guest Alonzo Felder, author of Discovering ASJ Allen.

Over the course of his 37-year formal career, as an IT analyst at Duke University, Alonzo became an expert in a number of research methods, and has done extensive work on his own family history.

In retirement, his work includes promoting the importance of family history and honoring ancestors.

Alonzo, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to be here.

And if you have anything else, I mean this whole conversation is kind of about your family and your legacy, and so I think this whole conversation will be about that.

But if there's any other details, you just want to immediately add to what I said. Feel free to share a little bit more about your immediate family.

Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, that intro was was wonderful, Brent. My immediate family, I'm living here in Durham, North Carolina.

I've been married to my wife, Francine, for over 40 years, and which is a real testament to her.

And we have two adult children, just up the number of grandchildren, I now have five grandchildren.

So if you look in the front of the book, you'll see I have it dedicated to my three grand sons.

I'm going to have to do something about that because now I have two granddaughters, both born on the same day, just a couple of weeks ago.

Wow. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, absolutely. That's those are beautiful little tidbits that become a part of our story.

Absolutely. I got this email from Alonzo. I don't know how it was a while ago. And one of those emails saying, hey, I have this book. I didn't know if you would be interested in reading his email was very aware.

You know, I know you get sent a lot of books and I do and every time I get on here doing these interviews, I complain about it. And here I am again.

And yet, Alonzo had this book about what it was like to, well, the title, Discovering ASJ Allen to discover those that had come before you, your predecessors.

I don't know if ancestors feel like too much of antiquity buried into that, but those that have come before you and experiences as black community and reconstruct.

We'll talk a little bit more about what this means, but reconstructionist era. And I thought, this is this is the kind of stuff I'm trying to read more of.

Because the kind of stuff I'm trying to surround my, these are the kinds of people and the kinds of voices that I'm wanting to, they're not present enough in my life. And so I said, yes, I actually do want to read your book and send me a copy.

And then the book came in the mail and it was big.

And so many pages here is it was 300 of content, another hundred of appendix and everything else and, yeah.

But man, it was, it was just a ton of fun.

...