Family & Self

This week I am attending a seminar at the John Carter Brown Library, and this gives me the perfect opportunity to read Kari Wulf’s new book! Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America is out this year and it is going to be interesting to a great many readers. At the most fundamental level, the single most impressive part of this book, to me, is the prodigious research. The bibliography lists over forty repositories (!) and Wulf relies on numerous published primary source collections. But numbers don’t speak for themselves. The true accomplishment here is how Wulf reads the sources. These family tracts, genealogical papers, and common place books are frequently opaque, and sometime just scraps held together. What those sources meant to their authors is always a little tricky to figure out—but not for Wulf. Instead, she has figured out how to read these sources and bring them to life.

The themes of the book that most interest me are what she has to say about the role of the individual in the long eighteenth century. Modern ideas of selfhood and individuality are a hallmark of this era, and Wulf has a lot to say about it that is new. She reminds us that “however we understand the development of a modern notion of the self. . . we do not need to posit the self as separate from or in opposition to the family” (12). Writing later about vernacular ideas she observes that “private reflections” about families “did not necessarily remain the private preserve of individuals or even of a single family unit” (59). Similar insights abound in the book. In short what the book makes me rethink is how some of the most private, even intimate, parts of peoples lives were anything but.

There are many other virtues of the book, to be sure. But this is the one that has most stuck with me, and it will shape my thinking for some time to come.