A ruddy pair of cowboy boots are haphazardly set on Henry Burke's porch, mud-caked from the fields surrounding the home he and his wife, Kim, share in Marietta. Burke sips his lemonade and looks past the porch to where his 7-year-old son, Max, climbs on the brightly colored play-set creaking with use in the backyard.

Burke's ancestors probably never had that opportunity. Set in a different time and across the Ohio River, they saw cotton instead of Kim's lilacs and peonies. Burke's great-great grandfather, John Curtis, didn't settle for the view given to him on a plantation in Rockingham, Va.

During the winter of 1846, he and his two brothers, Benjamin and Harrison, escaped from slavery. They made their way to Ohio, hiding in a cave in Washington County where his youngest brother Benjamin froze to death while bounty hunters searched for them. An abolitionist family found 16- and 14-year-olds John and Harrison, doctored them up and paid the Virginia slave owner for the boys' freedom. During the following years, the Curtis brothers worked in the abolitionist family's mill and fought for the Union Army in the Civil War.

Harrison never returned.

In 1870, John bought a farm in Stafford, Ohio, and there began the generations of free African-American men and women that link their heritage to him. In 1914, at the age of 84, John "Rockingham" Curtis died a free man on his own land.

The screen door eases back into its slightly crooked frame as Burke enters his home office. Wheat-colored sunlight fingers the yellowed photographs of banjos, suspenders and starched Sunday suits that don the walls, each telling a story and waiting for their stories to be told.

As an author and historian, Burke not only shares his family tales but those stories of many African-Americans in southern Ohio. His third book, Along the Mason Dixon Line, is on the computer screen, being edited for final copy errors before being sent to his publishers. The Escape of Jane and Journeys on the Underground Railroad both lay next to Burke, the founding president of the Underground Railroad Research Center of Southern Ohio, as he sits in front of the screen and glances at his forthcoming novel.

Burke devoted 30 years to working as a heavy excavation equipment operator. He was the first African-American strip mining foreman in Ohio and the founding president of the West Virginia Minority Contractors Association. Although he always found time for research during his lunch hours, Burke retired a few years ago after a heart attack and now is able to devote all of his time to following his interests.

Born in 1940 and reared by his grandparents in Marietta, Burke was surrounded by a generation closely linked to the family members he now researches. His great-grandmother and her brother, both born in the 1860s, lived near him during his childhood. He spent weekends and summers working and playing on the farm in Stafford, his great-great grandfather's hard-won legacy. Burke said he was "thrown back a generation" and there gained his passion for history.

"I hung around all these old people," he said with a wink. "I listened to their stories of slavery and the Underground Railroad. It wasn't history to me - I lived it."

Burke stroked his moustache and turned up the volume on his computer CD player. Like the Tchaikovsky reverberating throughout the room and dancing through floorboards, Burke's adoration of history surrounds him and is braided into his conversations.

With a Midas-like touch, Burke changes the places he frequents, toting his knowledge with him and sprinkling some of it in his wake. One of his favorite hangouts, The Levee House Cafe, is the only original river-front structure in Marietta. It has many of the same family photographs in the restaurant that hang on Burke's walls.

History is not the only subject close to Burke's heart. As if making up for the decades information kept out of his ancestors' hands, Burke strives to know about a vast array of fields. Whether it involves bulldozers, physics, anthropology, quantum mechanics or horsemanship - if a topic interests Burke, he studies it as ardently as he does his family genealogy.

"No one can be a slave if they have access to education," he said. "Anything that I've wanted to learn how to do, I'd do it."

With the rise of technology, Burke knew "in order to do the amounts of credible research" he wanted to accomplish, he needed to learn about computers. He enrolled in classes at Washington State Community College in Marietta and now, he not only has his own web page, but he is constructing several web sites for historical societies and groups.

As executive director of the Society for Intercultural History, he is busy adding research to its site as well as keeping his homepage up-to-date. Burke's weekly column for The Marietta Times, Windows to the Past, outlines African-American history and is available with a click on his homepage, which also features other essays and documents he has written or collected during his research. Burke said he hopes some of the sites will be used in classrooms throughout the area as an educational source.

"I'm in schools everyday - sometimes three in one day," Burke said of the frequent presentations and story readings he gives free of charge. If teachers would use the Web sites, Burke said he wouldn't have to travel as much, and more children would have access to the information.

"I don't want kids not knowing their history," he said.