FROM THESE HILLS: AN AMERICAN FAMILY'S ODYSSEY

By Michael Moore

Growing up in with his grandmother in Portsmouth, Ohio, Mike Moore believed that his parents had died in California when he was young. He knew only his mother's family and he lived with those perceptions until a random computer entry and an encounter with a statue in Ireland forced him to re-examine his past. After retiring from Bowling Green State University, Mike and his wife Sue traveled the length and breadth of the U.S. searching for the truth - from the ruins of the famed Hanging Rock Iron Region to his father's ancestral grounds in the Kentucky and Virginia mountains, and from a potter's cemetery in Los Angeles back to the Ohio River Valley where it all began. Along the way, they made new and dear friends and discovered relatives whose warmth and acceptance made Mike a part of a larger family he had never known. They are all part of a story that celebrates a family's will to endure for over 200 years and that depicts this author's discovery of his place in that odyssey.