In this paper a three-parameter family of Boussinesq systems is studied. The systems have been proposed as models of the propagation of long internal waves along the interface of a two-layer system of fluids with rigid-lid condition for the upper layer and under a Boussinesq regime for the flow in both layers. The contents of the paper are as follows. We first present some theoretical properties of well-posedness, conservation laws and Hamiltonian structure of the systems, using the results for analogous models for surface wave propagation. Then the corresponding periodic initial-value problem is discretized in space by the spectral Fourier Galerkin method and for each well posed system, error estimates for the semidiscrete approximation are proved. The rest of the paper is concerned with the study of existence and the numerical simulation of some issues of the dynamics of solitary-wave solutions. Standard theories are used to derive several results of existence of classical and generalized solitary waves, depending on the parameters of the models. A numerical procedure based on a Fourier collocation approximation for the ode system of the solitary wave profiles with periodic boundary conditions, and on the iterative solution of the resulting fixed-point systems with the Petviashvili scheme combined with vector extrapolation techniques, is used to generate numerically approximations of solitary waves. These are taken as initial conditions in a computational study of the dynamics of the solitary waves, both classical and generalized. To this end, the spectral semidiscretizations of the periodic initial-value problem for the systems are numerically integrated by a fourth-order Runge-Kutta-composition method based on the implicit midpoint rule. The fully discrete scheme is then used to approximate the evolution of small and large perturbations of computed solitary wave profiles, and to study computationally the collisions of solitary waves as well as the resolution of initial data into trains of solitary waves.