I’m glad you stopped by. It is my pleasure to welcome you to my website. As you will soon learn, I am sharing with the world my enlightening journey about my nearly fifteen year quest to unlock the missing details of my family history during the period of slavery in North and South Carolina. And of course, ultimately find the ancestral African land of my ancestors through census records and even DNA testing. No small task.

When I first began this incredible journey it was my intention to record whatever information about my family, the Littlefields, that I and my parents could find as we traveled back through a dark time in American and world history.

There is something to be said about starting at the bottom, “you have nowhere to go but up.” That was the case for us because much of our family history beyond that of my paternal great grandfather was sorely missing from our modern day history.

Now, my family can now say that after much hard work, trial and error and an enriching experience, the door to our family’s past is now open wider that ever before as told in the pages of my book, Bittersweet Journey: The Story of the Wounding, Healing and Triumph of a Family. I’m often asked, what is my book about? True, it is about how my family first endured then overcame slavery, but in a greater sense the story is about finding home and family.

So I encourage you to visit each page on this website, there is something about my journey of discovery, my journey to becoming a published author and my contribution to American literature and Black literature. In particular, visit the ‘book excerpts’ tab and you can read compelling excerpts from Bittersweet Journey. In addition to the book excerpts you can also listen to a book reading from Bittersweet Journey at my internet radio show Books and Things. The website is www.blogtalkradio.com/books-and-things. Tune into the November 19, 2009 show.

As I said, my story is about finding home and family. To finding family, I would like to introduce you to three remarkable people that I soon discovered near the beginning of my family tree. Left to right, they are my paternal great-great grandmother, Margaret Stepp Littlefield, my paternal great-great grandfather, Richard Littlefield and his sister Penne, living in the beautiful mountain community of Black Mountain, North Carolina not long after the Civil War.

This handsome couple are my paternal great grandparents, Benjamin and Caroline Littlefield. They were part of the first generation born after slavery. Benjamin and Caroline migrated from Black Mountain, NC to Columbus, Ohio in the year 1918 with nine children. One among them was my grandfather, Lawrence.