Surviving Damnation

Dr.R.W."Ben" Benoit has been a resident of Colorado for thirty-five years and is formerly from New England. He is a retired High Shcool teacher, administrator and coach from the Littleon Public Schools in Colorado. He has done graduate work in France at the U.of Bordeaux, at the U. of Denver and earned his doctoral degree in French Literature at the U. of Kansas.When Ben became an avid student of Genealogy, he discovered his Acadian ancestry. There were many Benoits, but he definitely was not interested in "name gathering." He chose writing rather than becoming a "database expert." He was not satifsfied in merely gathering raw facts of people being born, marrying and being buried, but in researcing the times and places in which they lived and/or in the historical events in which which they might have been involved. Like the French Expressionists, what excited Ben was to use facts as points of color that, at a distance, blended to create scenes so real, one could feel the emotions of these ancestors.Since then he has seen two of his family history books published. The latter, "Conversations With Ancestors" was featured in the National Genealogical Society Newsmagazine in 2001.