In general approach and content, this book resembles Alex Haley's best-selling novel, Roots, except that this work contains no fiction. It chronicles thirty generations and a thousand years of Sanders (and Saunders) family evolution beginning before England's earliest days and ending across the Atlantic in colonial Virginia and eventually frontier and later Kentucky. Family figures are portrayed in their own distinctive historical contexts and an extensive genealogy focused on old world lineage is appended. Nearly a thousand chapter notes on sources and names are furnished to assist readers interested in discovering their own ancestry.