This is the autobiography of my great-grandfather, Alois Preston Fitz Randolph, who taught one-room schools across West Virginia for 50 years.  He wrote this opening paragraph to the book:

This twenty-fourth day of April, 1950, I, Alois Preston Fitz Randolph, will begin a short account of my life as I remember it in this 78^th year of my life. This record is being recorded by me upon the request of my baby preacher boy and his capable, helpful wife. They said a few hours’ writing a week would leave an account of things as they were in parts of West Virginia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, which the children and possibly some of the grandchildren might prize.

This is the time line of the autobiography:

• Handwritten in 1950 as one narrative, without chapters
• Alois Preston Fitz-Randolph died November 10, 1953
• The handwritten story was typed up and mimeographed in 1963 by his granddaughter, E. Mae Fitz Randolph Lewis, with copies distributed to family members
• One copy was scanned and saved electronically in 1997 by mysef (it was a lot of work cleaning up the scanned document, as there were many errors converting the mimeographed pages to text)
• The document was divided into logical chapters in 1997 by his granddaughter, E. Mae Fitz Randolph Lewis for easier reading on the web.  The order of the paragraphs was not changed, only chapter divisions were added for easier reading on screen.
• Moved to my new web site in 2009