"Write our stories! Write our stories NOW!" The ancestors prodded Kathy Lynne Marshall awake one morning during her sixtieth year of life. She had retired from a 36-year career with the California Highway Patrol as a researcher, analyst and technical writer. In her 60th year of life, Marshall realized that if she didn't write books about her family, nobody would. Her life changed dramatically as she began spending hours every day researching her tangled Euro-African lineage, while sitting in front of a computer in California, or traveling to the places where her ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. Since 2016, Marshall has published at least one book per year, and written short stories and essays for anthologies and genealogy journals. It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions and a difficult process finding documents for a population that often wasn’t considered human before 1870. But the results born from Marshall’s tenacity and resilience are astonishing and fulfilling. Marshall’s creative nonfiction heritage books grace bookshelves in libraries, universities, family homes, as well as people interested in tracing their own family histories. Many have said they used the hints and tips in Marshall’s “Solving Your Mystery” chapter to write their own books. THE ANCESTORS ARE SMILING!