Question: How do I contact Ric if I want him to speak at a house party, book signing, or at my next event?

Answer: If you have an upcoming event and would like Ric to participate, please go to the Contact page or email Ric here for more details.

Question: Why did you choose the title Freedom Road?

Answer: I choose Freedom Road as a title because it reflects the nexus between the African, European and Native American races each struggling to find the road to their own personal freedoms over a four hundred year period. This is my family’s story, of their personal journey to their freedom road.

Question: How did you conduct your research?

Answer: Freedom Road is the culmination of over thirty years of primary and secondary research, long before paid genealogical subscriptions and internet services. It initially started with the rich oral histories of my maternal and paternal grandparents sharing funny stories about their youth and family members. As elderly family members memories faded about the deaths and dates of departed love ones, it then led me to the colonial vital records of several Massachusetts’ communities, as well as the state Archives and Vital Records Office, where every birth, marriage and death certificate has been meticulously kept since the late 1600s, and upon finding lineal ancestors copies of their pertinent records began to fill first file folders than file cabinets. I then began to catalog family pictures and artifacts, and while traveling across the country expanded my research to town halls and courthouses compiling source files long forgotten. In the mid-1980s, I visited the U.S. archives and made copies of original military records and pension documents. The library at the Daughters of the American Revolutions is one of the world’s largest repositories of colonial records, and instrumental in helping piece together the reminder of my research.

Question: If I want to conduct genealogical research what would recommend?

Answer: (1) I would take a notebook and interview every elderly relative that you know and interview them, (2) Ask your elders if you can make copies of old family photos (3) Take advantage of anyone of the popular genealogical internet services and find your elderly relatives in the towns where they were born. Look for census records, birth, death or marriage certificates, make a copy of it and for census records, (4) In the book I provide valuable reading materials where you search family names and do a reverse search. If your family originated in a town that was part of any of the original colonies, try finding a family name and see if you can connect your present day family with anyone of the family names in the various publications, (5) Go back to step one and talk to your elderly relatives (they will love to see you again); you will be amazed how old family names and places will jog their memories.

Question: Are you planning to write a sequel to Freedom Road?

Answer: The writing of Freedom Road was such a huge opportunity, and the individual stories of each of the men and women who contributed so much to the foundation of our American democracy that I intend to research and explore each character more deeply, and continue to write about each of them, the period of time in which they lived and the vast contributions that they each made.

Question: What is your next book about, and when will it be published?

Answer: I have been given the privilege to write the biography of Admiral Lawrence C. Chambers, one of the characters in Freedom Road, who was the Captain of the USS Midway and was instrumental in Operation Frequent Wind, the 1975 evacuation of Saigon. Keeping our fingers crossed, it will be released in the fall of 2016.