This is Volume I of five volumes about the not-so-ordinary family tree of an ordinary American family. The five volumes comprise a complete history of my family tree in narrative form, approached with humor, and accompanied by hundreds of family and historical photos and charts interspersed throughout. I’ve intended it to read much like a scrapbook. While I wrote Ruth’s Roots with family members in mind, I think it offers something that non-relative genealogy and history buffs might enjoy as well. My family is a typical American middle-class family, but genealogical research has revealed my ancestors to be a veritable bunch of Forrest Gumps, who had numerous and, to me, amazing connections to cultural icons and well-known figures in American history. Some I had partial knowledge of before I began this effort, but most were complete surprises, making me feel like a time-travel detective. Volume I is about my parents, Walter Moore Watts and Dorothy Adelene Barnett. The other four volumes relate to each of their parents and their family trees. Volume I: Hersey Bars and Jim Beam , is an exploration of the lives of my parents, Dorothy "Adelene" Barnett and Dr. Walter Moore Watts Jr., who are, after all, the main protagonists of this book. Volume II: Astronomers and Kings, looks into the Watts/Moore family of my paternal great-grandfather, Walter Moore Watts Sr. Much of the action takes place in Pennsylvania, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, New Jersey, and in particular, Asheville, North Carolina. There is also an incredible episode that happened in eighteenth century England and in the nascent American cities of Philadelphia and Washington City, where an ancestor's life intersected with several Founding Fathers. Volume III: Hillbillies and Tories, examines my paternal grandmother's Neely/Nelson families, set on the Eastern Seaboard as they gradually wended their way southward and westward toward Asheville, North Carolina, where my great-grandfather established a haberdashery in the early 1900s. Volume IV: William Faulkner and the Grove Park Inn tells the story of my maternal grandfather Albert Nunnally Barnett and his Barnett/Nunnally family tree. There is no shortage of Southern Gothic in his background! His family’s lives played out primarily in Colonial Charleston, South Carolina; Ripley, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia, and ultimately in Asheville, North Carolina, where my grandfather managed the historic Grove Park Inn during its heyday of the 1920s and ‘30s. Volume V: General Sherman and Coca Cola explores the lives of my maternal grandmother, Marcellus Bailey Hallman's, family tree of Hallmans and Lowrys. Over several centuries their families slowly made their way into the Deep South, where they acquired a deep-fried Southern flavor and were on the ground floor of the burning of Atlanta and its re-building after the Civil War. I published two e-books about my family in 2014, and this is a recompilation of that research in print form, with some added information.