Richard Greene

One summers day a few years ago not long after I retired, I was sitting on my patio keeping a glass of Jack Daniels and Diet Coke company when I started thinking of some of the questions my son, and daughter had asked about my life and upbringing. It suddenly occurred to me that they knew nothing about me, and that got me to thinking that I knew nothing about my own mother and father.

Knowing very little about my families history, I began on my arduos journey into the world of genealogy. My father had passed away several years ago, but my mother was still alive, and she was able to tell me a lot about her side of the family, and a little about my fathers family. I knew for instance that he was from Texas, and knew that he and his family once lived in the Houston area. So to start, I began calling the Greene's in Houston and was able to find a cousin, that gave me a lot of information,  and as good as it was, it only went back so far. However with what she gave me, and what my mother told me I was able to trace my heritage back to the 1600's.

During my research I became close to my ancestors and was fascinated by what I had found and could not wait to share all of this information with the rest of my families, including brothers, cousins, childred etc. The funny thing is, no one was really all that interested, and that irriatated me. So I thought about  that for a while, and  came to realize that all of this was boring, and just a bunch of stuff like census recrods, probate records, military records etc. Then it dawned on me. "I need to write a book."

So  I sat down at my PC and began typing, and doing research about the civil war, the battles the men fought, and even with that, it was not enough. I hunted for family lore, and tales from distant cousins I had never met. With all of that information, I used my own imagination and wrote "Death of Innocence", the story of my family that lived during one of the most important era's of our country. The time of the Great Civil War. When the book was finished, it turned out to be 6x9, 528 pages and weighed in at about a pound.