Robert Scott Davis, Jr. is director of the Genealogy Program of Wallace State Community College, Hanceville, Alabama. His duties include organizing field trips for his classes throughout the country; helping to build one of the South's most extensive genealogical collections; and teaching genealogy in one of the first colleges to offer genealogy as a college level course.

Bob was born February 14 (St. Valentine's Day), 1954 to Robert S. Davis, Sr. of Atlanta and his wife Elizabeth Kathleen Holbert of Jasper, Ga. Their families descend from the Smith, Davis, Martin, Hudgins, Burton, Magwire, Ellison, Allred, Rodgers, and Faulkner families of Hall County and the Holbert, Haygood, Hammontree, Richards, Farriba, Honea, Nicholson, and Tomlin families of Pickens County. Bob's ancestry includes moonshiners; Union and Confederate soldiers; a Georgia state senator who represented a Georgia county in another state; ministers; vigilantes; Cherokee Indians; and other interesting characters. He is married to Nancy Lynn Murphree and they have two children, Isaac and Erica.

From his earliest memories, he was interested in local and family history. As a cadet colonel in his high school Jr. Air Force ROTC unit, he buried a time capsule to be opened in 200 years, in recognition of his favorite television program Star Trek. This project brought him in contact with the Georgia Department of Archives and History for the first time (they did the microfilming for his time capsule) and caused him to be interviewed on NBC television's First Tuesday Program. After graduation, Bob took a three week tour of Europe and Israel by himself. As president of the North Georgia College Social Science Club he put together his college museum, when not skydiving and studying guerrilla warfare with the Aggressor platoon. Also while a cadet at NGC, he became Georgia's first history intern and researched and wrote a report on the Kettle Creek Revolutionary War Battlefield, in co-operation with Kenneth H. Thomas, Jr. of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Bob graduated from Piedmont College with a straight "A" average, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. With almost as high an average, he has obtained a Master of Education degree in history from North Georgia College and a certificate in computer programming from Pickens Area Technical School. He also has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 1995, he attended and graduated from the Institute of Documentary Editing conducted by the National Historical Records Publication Commission of the National Archives.

Until going to work for Wallace State College as a professor of genealogy in 1991, Bob worked as a free lance historical researcher. Most of his clients were family researchers seeking genealogical data although their research problems were of the widest variety. He also compiled several books on Georgia research and records for various groups, most notably for the Southern Historical Press and the Magnolia Press. Among the most popular genealogical sources books for Georgia are his Research in Georgia With a Special Emphasis on the Georgia Department of Archives and History (one of the first research guides written on a particular state); The Georgia Black Book: Morbid, Macabre, and Sometimes Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value; A Researcher's Library of Georgia; The Wilkes County Papers; and Georgia Citizens and Soldiers of the American Revolution.

When not teaching, Bob writes articles and books, usually on Georgia records and history. In addition to almost thirty professional historical publications and over 600 publications total), he has also reviewed articles and books for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, South Carolina Historical Magazine, The American Genealogist, and Atlanta Historical Journal. The genealogical journals that have published his material include:

The National Genealogical Society Quarterly, The American Genealogist, The North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal, and The Ancestry Newsletter. No one else has ever had articles in simultaneous issues of Georgia's state genealogy, history, library, and archivist journals (winter 1993). In 1988, Bob had articles simultaniously in the most importanbt of the natuionwide genealogical periodicals of the United States. He has been contributing editor to five Georgia genealogical periodicals and Heritage Quest. He has regular genealogical columns in The Cullman Times and Georgia Genealogical Society Quarterly; he is currently listed as a contributing editor to Heritage Quest and The North Georgia Journal. Because of his background in Georgia Research, Bob was called upon to write the introduction for the index to the 1870 federal census of Georgia and to revise the Georgia chapter of the 1991 edition of Redbook. He has been quoted on National Public Radio's program All Things Considered; Smithsonian magazine; and in Time.

His most important work has been in trying to save Georgia's recorded heritage. He wrote the original draft of the 1980 Georgia Records Act, which extends legal protection to all of Georgia's state and local records. For the past few years he has been conducting campaigns to win public support for restoring the various programs for saving our records that the current administration of the Georgia Department of Archives and History has shut down. While the new administration has been making effortsto discourage the use of Georgia's records and archives, Bob has been publishing articles and a workbook to make the Archives more accessible. Among the many collections and materials he has obtained for the Georgia Archives are thousands of dollars worth of microfilm of the colonial Georgia records in the British Public Record Office; the Georgia Loyalist claims; the Sheftall Collection of records of Georgia Revolutionary War soldiers; the North Carolina Revolutionary War pay vouchers; the Georgia government records at Duke University, and much more. He was also responsible for the Georgia Archives obtaining the new addition to the Joseph M. Toomey Collection of Wilkes County records (some 15,000 items) and he helped arrange for the opening of the personal research files of genealogist Leon Hollingsworth to the public. The R. J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation sent him to Great Britain for a month in 1990 to identify early Georgia records for microfilming for use by American researchers at the Georgia Archives. He also arranged for the Kollock Family Papers, 1797-1900, and the historic site reports of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to be microfilmed for the donation to the Georgia Archives. Bob has also donated original manuscripts, notes, and microfilm to the Georgia Historical Society, the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia. Among the latter are the Clarke/Mounger Family files of genealogist Robert Wilson.

He was also responsible for the Dr. George F. Walker Collection being donated to the Washington Memorial Library in Macon, GA. The Georgia Vital Records Unit's decision to open the indexes to Georgia vital records to the general public came largely as the result of a long campaign orchestrated by Bob Davis. Bob has conducted genealogical workshops in Georgia, Ala-

bama, North Carolina, California, Texas, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. He delivered papers before the National Genealogical Society in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1988, in Arlington, Virginia in 1990, Jacksonville, Florida in 1992, and Houston, Texas in 1994; taught genealogy at the Senior College of Emory University; the Genealogical Institute of (Dallas) Texas; and at the genealogical institute of Samford University. He has appeared on Cable News Network and has also lectured on genealogy at Beville State College, Georgia State University, and Clayton State University.

For his work, Robert Davis received an Outstanding Young Man in America award from the Jaycees in 1976, received the National Award of Merit from the National Genealogical Society in 1986, and in 1990 was an alternate delegate to the Georgia Governor's Conference on Library and Information Services. In 1991, he was elected a trustee of the Association of Professional Genealogists

and in December 1994, Governor James Folsom appointed him to the Alabama Historical Records Advisory Board. He is included in both editions of the Who's Who of American Genealogy and Heraldry. Bob is a charter member and past president of the Marble Valley (Pickens County) Historical Society, as well as a former member of his regional historic preservation board and as half of the Pickens County Georgia Sesquicentennial Committee. He organized his local library's history room; collected the area's historical photographs; and arranged for the microfilming of his county's newspapers (which he located) and loose original county records. He still serves on the advisory committee for the restoration of the Trippe-Simmons-Nelson House. In Blountsville, Alabama, where he now lives, he is helping the historical society to document the town's oldest buildings.