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Karin Wulf, "Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Karen Wolf about her book titled Lineage, Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Now, this book takes us back, as the subtitle suggests, to the early United States, where genealogy was a big thing. Yes. We're talking about, like, in many instances, a piece of paper where it's written down kind of who was married to who and had what kids. But the simplicity of those two pieces of paper hides a lot of really interesting thinking and complexity about why people were writing this down. What were they writing down? Where were they keeping these things? What wasn't being written down, what was being used? What were these documents being used for? There's all sorts of things that can be understood by sort of taking these bits of paper seriously and not just going like, oh, great uncle, blah, blah, blah, was also named Robert. Like, that's so boring.
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C
Right.
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B
It turns out there's loads of intriguing things if we can get past maybe that looking at a bit of paper and thinking it's not significant. This book definitely proves that those pieces of paper are incredibly significant for individual families. But also to give Us a sense of kind of what was happening in this time and place. So, Karen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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C
Thank you, Miranda. It's really delightful to be here with you.
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B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:41]
C
Yes, sure. So I'm a historian of early America, broadly speaking, 18th century British America, although I've written about kind of what I call vast early America and thinking about the complexity of multiple empires and of course, vast indigenous populations and cultures and African descended people enslaved in the Americas. But I focused particularly on women, families and politics in all of my work. And it was actually because I ran across something in that previous work that looked like genealogical research. And I thought, huh, I didn't know people were doing that in the 18th century. I thought it was the great age of individualism. And why are they so interested in doing this bit of genealogical research? So I just started to pull that, that thread and the project became much bigger. I'm sure every one of us has a story like that. You start with one sort of question mark and it leads to something bigger. So that's why I wrote the book.
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B
As you said, that is quite a common and always intriguing start to a book because kind of what is that small thread that then you start pulling is always a fascinating thing to start conversations with. So thank you for sharing kind of that insight into your work with this project. If we then pull that thread and look at this kind of world of British American genealogical writing, how do we know a piece of paper kind of fits into that category? How, for example, would you think about the identifiers of sort of, you know, someone in an archive goes, hey, is this in your group? Like, what would make you say yes or no?
- [04:21]
C
So interesting. I mean, one of the, there are, there's so many dimensions to genealogy. And one of them is that I think sometimes we assume that genealogy is this kind of timeless, universal practice that people everywhere were interested in family connections and that they were sort of more or less keeping track of that, whether they knew, you know, their parents, their siblings, or a much more extended set of kin. And that we recognize that the world over people define kin and family relationships differently, but they are interested in exploring those. And that is kind of true. There is a kind of way in which people through time and space are interested in family relationships, but it's really historically specific how they choose to represent those family relationships. Which is basically what genealogy is. You're representing those relationships. And part of the work of this book is to show that British American genealogy was not just the kind of what you expect, but rather had historically specific parameters that had to do with Protestantism, for one thing, and also people living in a monarchical form of government. Of course, I do trace, like, what happens to genealogy when monarchical government leaves North America or British America, certainly. And then also, of course, the law, the common law, the British American common law tradition, which is profoundly about property and inheritance. And it is these kind of key pieces that are nested together, what I call Bible king and common law, religion, law and government, that make a very specifically and specifically potent form of genealogical practice in early America. Hmm.
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B
Okay. Can we talk a little bit more about some of those threads that are coming together in this moment in time to kind of make this, as you said, such a potent thing at this point?
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C
Sure. I mean, so when we think about. I mean, it sounds a little boring to say, like, the Bible is a really important source of genealogical thinking for people in the 18th century. It seems a little obvious, but it's worth kind of peeling that back, I think, and saying, like, look, you know, people in 18th century British America are, if they are free people, it's a highly literate population, and they're very aware of both Old Testament and New Testament teaching and traditions around genealogy. In the Old Testament, it's very begat, begat, begat. We all know that. I think if we're familiar at all with the Christian Bible and in the New Testament, a lot of focus early on, in particular on the lineage of Jesus from the house of David. So there is a kind of, like, textual relationship to the Bible, but also there's a lot of Christian teachings in this time that emphasize the importance of the family and the importance particularly of the patriarchal model of family, where people are, and in particular women are, have a kind of subordinated role to men, but that one should be attentive to one's kind of family relationships. So there's a way in which there is both text and practice that teaches people that genealogy, knowing your family relationships is important. Now, how does that become specific to the 18th century? Well, some of this has to do with a kind of book history I.e. that Bibles in early America were largely imported from Britain until very late in the 18th century. They're not that common people know the text and the practice, but they actually keep the recorded family histories, which they learn in, in some sense from Protestant practice. And Text in other kinds of places. So that's one way in which it's kind of specific to the 18th century in that kind of religious tradition. Anyway.
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B
Yeah, the Bible part is really key, even if it seems obvious, as you said, like there's a reason it's so embedded. Are there any other sources of this besides the Bible we want to discuss?
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C
Oh yeah, absolutely. And let me just say one more thing, if you don't mind, about the Bible. Like, I think, you know, people, when they asked me, you, oh, you're interested in the history of genealogy. Did people just keep their family histories in Bibles? And I would have to say kind of repeatedly, no. The Bible wasn't the dominant place where people would record family histories for a variety of different reasons. They're expensive, not everyone has access to them. But also because there are these other places where people nest. Their family records, account books, almanacs, little purpose built, hand stitched, tiny. What we might think of as pamphlets or notebooks. There are other places where people put those family records. But then, you know, as I said, religion is one kind of source of thinking and structure around genealogy in this period. Another is the law, which really emphasizes inheritance and to know your family relationships so you understand from whom one might inherit or to whom one might bequeath property. In the case of British America, that becomes particularly cruel because the institution of heritable slavery gets knitted up into that common law tradition and into that emphasis on inheritance so that mothers who are enslaved have children who are enslaved and tracking their family relationships for purposes of keeping them as enslaved property becomes equally important. So we have religion, we have the law. And then of course, the monarchy is nothing if not about genealogy and who succeeds whom on the basis of their family relationships. So it was really that kind of triune thing there. That's religion, law and politics that all emphasize, and all structurally as well as in practice, the importance of genealogy. So it's sort of those pieces of paper where people are keeping track of, you know, I think you said Uncle Robert, but it is really about that kind of infrastructure of the significance of genealogy and its overweening emphasis in this period.
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B
Yeah, that's helpful to understand the different things that are all coming together. Right. We know that people enact practices when there's even just one reason to nevertheless three really powerful ones as you've outlined there. But when we're talking about the Bible, we're talking about law, we're talking about the monarchy. Yes, they're all definitely very into recording genealogy, but different parts of genealogy.
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C
Right.
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B
Like certain relationships matter more than others. So can you tell us about the ways that this. Those influences and structures of what a genealogy should look like in this context, what that's doing for things like patriarchy and embedding kind of other understandings, not just of relationships, but sort of hierarchies of relationships.
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C
So interesting. And because we see these, like, different contexts play out, I guess one thing that's important to note in the way that I talk about how both genealogy is something that people have a kind of. It becomes a kind of emotional expression of family relationships. And you can see this in a whole wide variety of different contexts, whether it's the meaning that's attached to specific objects or whether it's kind of textual production around moments of death. There's a lot of meaning attached to the product production of these things. But it's also true that genealogy is extracted. So it's extracted by the government in the course of keeping records. It's extracted by the church in the course of keeping records about people's family relationships. So when you think about, like, what hierarchies of family relationships or which particular family relationships are represented in genealogies, I think it's useful to distinguish between what people are producing themselves and what's being extracted and produced for them. And of course, when I say this, it's not a fully separate process here. These are intertwined processes. People take information and give it, let's say, to the town government, my child was born, or, you know, we were married, or, you know, someone died or so on. So there is some intertwining here. But I think where we see kind of which family relationships matter, there's so many different contexts that inform that. But I'll just use two quick examples. One would be the kind of patriarchal context of people choosing to emphasize their patrilineal connections at certain points where they see that that is an essential connection. And we see the importance of that connection in law, for example, in inheritance schemes, where until quite late, boys are still quite privileged, it takes a while for them to cast off the idea that eldest sons should inherit more than younger children or daughters. And another example would be here, where matrilineal connections, where the maternal ancestry is so important. And again, I'll just go back to the significance of slavery, where heritable slavery is embedded in, literally in the body of mothers who are enslaved. So those are kind of two places where you see those hierarchies play out, one in the course of privilege, of property, and the other in the instance of cruelty and an absolute lack of power and privilege.
- [13:55]
B
Yeah, those are opposite ends in many ways of the spectrum, and yet very much show the kind of embeddedness of a lot of these ideas. Are there any other contexts in which these genealogies would be made by families because they were seen to be useful in some sort of way? Right. Like, obviously, when it's a question of a posh family going, well, who's going to inherit the land? Right. That's one use case. What were some other use cases besides monitoring enslaved people or kind of dealing with the top echelons of property management?
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C
So one thing that surprised me is how many people were attentive to inheritance even when they really didn't have much, from our vantage, much property to give onto their descendants. So even if people had just limited amount of livestock, let's say, or limited amount of clothing, which we know was very dear in the 18th century, they were nonetheless quite attentive to who might inherit it or to the possibility that they might have inherited something. So I think that attentiveness to the potential for inheritance runs really, really deep into the full kind of socioeconomic strata there. And then the other thing I'll say is that I think that what you're raising is where is it and how is it that economic relationships play into why and how genealogy is valuable? And that is, you know, in the case of inheritance, we can say someone is thinking, well, am I going to, you know, profit by this or not? But we can see that on an even larger scale where families are drawing on their connections in order to invest in their undertakings, where people write to one another to ask them to vouch for them in this world of, you know, this credit economy, where one's name and one's reputation is so important to how one can function economically. In the book, I tell the story of a family that is transatlantic. They are based in Philadelphia and Maryland and also in London and in Wales and also in Madeira. And they're pulling on the Madeira based set of relations, are pulling on all of the other connections in order to make a corner port wine enterprise viable. And I see that in lots of cases where people write to. I think we're cousins and I just wanted to tell you I'm onto this new thing and would you be interested in it? And you see that in. Even in very local cases where I see that all over the colonies, where people are calling on their family relations for economics support, assistance, literally at every level of the kind of socioeconomics.
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B
Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect of what you trace in the book. Especially, you do, as you mentioned, have some families where it's like, wow, those connections are pretty far flung.
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C
Right.
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B
And you may never meet each other, but you're going crossing the oceans and doing all sorts of things on ships off the basis of the cousin of the cousin of the cousin.
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C
Right.
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B
Which is very intertwined. One thing I noticed, though, is a lot of those families, especially the ones that kind of had these transatlantic connections, seem to be Quaker. Is that a coincidence or was that especially a thing in Quaker communities?
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C
That's a great question. The short answer is it's not exclusively Quaker, but there's a reason why I was interested in tracing this particular Quaker family in this way. And I'll just say that, you know, one problem with this project, maybe we all have this problem with our projects, but the research, it was hard to cut off because there's so much of it. And I continue to just turn up stuff all the time. And just recently I was reading in the correspondence of George Washington, of all people, and a woman who wrote to him for over 25 years, like, well before he was really fancy George Washington, just letting him know that she was very sure that they were cousins and she would love to be in touch in kind of desperate straits. And there were reasons why she wanted kind of his assistance. But she was very persistent over years, and he took quite a bit of care to write to her eventually and say, look, here's my whole genealogy. And no, I'm confident we're not related. But you can see in all kinds of ways how people are trying to pull on what they think might be potential family relationships because they think that there is something to. That, there is credit to be gained in that. But Quakers so important to think about, like, why and how Quakers enter into this kind of wider genealogical culture. They're interesting in a couple of different ways. I mean, confession here. I started with Quakers because I'd written about Quakers before and I knew a bit about this particular family that I wrote about, the kind of extended Lloyd Norris family. But also I think people, you know, who have some familiarity with the 18th century, or anyone who has encountered genealogical records from the 18th century British American world might know that Quaker records are terrific. They're just great. In fact, you know, when the General Record Office was set up in the mid 19th century, one of the first things they said was like, we should go get Quaker records. Quaker meeting records are great. They're really, really thorough about those vital, vital statistics. But Quakers the reason that Quakers were so attentive to record keeping and to producing a kind of genealogical infrastructure is because they were anxious about their position as. As. As outsiders, essentially. And they were anxious about the fact that they were not an authorized religion. They were external to the state religion, they were dissenters. And they worried that their marri, and thus their children's legitimacy and thus their ability to pass on property to their children would not be acknowledged by the government. And so they wanted to be sure to keep thorough records. And they say this very clearly. George Fox and Margaret Fell, they say these things, keep your careful records always. And it's also true that keeping track of who was coming into the Quaker meeting, their congregation, was quite important, too. So there is a kind of kernel of a practice, genealogical practice, to Quaker record keeping that expands and then expands as Quakers spread out kind of around the world, and particularly around the Atlantic world. So by the time you get to the 18th century, it is possible for these particular Quakers that I talk about in this chapter about the kind of family across from Madeira to the east coast of North America to Britain, it's possible that for them to know quite a lot about their Quaker connections, you know, 100 years earlier, they've articulated that they've shared that information with one another and they have the records to demonstrate it. So Quakers are not entirely unique in this, but they are a fantastic case study of what happens when you create a kind of data infrastructure.
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B
And, you know, historians love things like that. So makes sense that you've gone into those archives in depth. Yeah, it is. However, as you said, not just the Quakers.
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C
Right.
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B
George Washington, pretty sure not a Quaker yet. He's responding. You know, he's taking seriously this letter saying, like, hey, no, I'm your cousin. He's like, actually, hang on, Right. And he's going and doing research and keeping track of it in a way that obviously makes sense to him, but also is legible to someone he's never met before.
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C
Right.
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B
Which suggests that there's shared understanding not just about why a genealogy is useful, but, like, actually how to go about it. How do we write these things down? How do we do this kind of research? How do we maintain genealogies as things change? So what were those sorts of practices? And it sounds like those were pretty widespread, you know, whether you were dissenter or not. Like, everyone had an idea of, like, what one should do to keep a genealogy, Right?
- [22:30]
C
Yeah, absolutely. One of the best questions that I got while I was working on the book and, you know, kind of sharing pieces here and there. And, you know, giving presentations to get feedback is very astute scholar said, but what about people who just didn't participate in this? Like, are there, you know, kind of null actors in this, in this whole genealogical scheme that you're setting out, Karen? And, you know, part of my answer was, well, it was very hard for people not to be in this world of genealogical information production and collection, because even if you didn't care about genealogy, genealogy almost always cared about you. So, you know, there were every colonial assembly passed laws at its founding requiring the collection of birth, marriage, and death records. You just find that the law, the records of the courts, are just rife with people tracing family connections for different reasons, not just inheritance, but also who belongs to this place and has legitimate claim on, for example, the very small amount of poor relief that one could get from the place where one was born, the place where one belonged in their construction of this. But so it's really hard to find somebody who is fully and wholly outside that system. But it is also very easy to find people who enter into it not just willingly, but understanding its implications. And George Washington is definitely one of those. I mean, you know, he created a family tree when he was in his teens that showed six generations of his family. It's a kind of a rough, hewn little object, but it's just an excellent example of how early he understood the importance of understanding many generations of his family and how inheritance, power, and wealth in the Virginia context would pass through that family and to him. And when he became president, he was also very deeply engaged with a kind of genealogical conversation with Sir Isaac Herd, who was the Garter King of arms, and was interested in authenticating the Washington lineage and had done a lot of research on it, and they had some super interesting kind of back and forth on it. But even in between those two moments, his being a teenager and his being president of the United States, Washington had many, many, many cases and opportunities to exchange, exchange and value genealogical information. And no, he was definitely not a Quaker.
- [25:14]
B
Yeah, that's definitely an interesting example to discuss. Right. Going from families that we aren't aware of to families that, of course, are incredibly influential. And these sort of moments of when information changes, I think, is also a really interesting piece of this. Obviously, in the example in his life, like, there's the kind of moment of him being a teenager becoming an adult. There's also the moment of him becoming president. Right. Like kind of changes in life show up, but the ones that obviously every. Everyone has, not everyone becomes president but everyone has, you know, has to die at some point. So we get mourning, we get funerals, we get graveyards, all happening. How were genealogies involved in those aspects?
- [25:53]
C
Yes, and yes, exactly. Those life changing moments, Those life moments. I think those moments really produced a lot of genealogical reflection and genealogical materials too. And absolutely, graveyards are extraordinary sites of genealogical representation. You know, there are so many places where we see family burials clustered and we're just learning more about burial of enslaved people. And especially in parts of the North American mid Atlantic colonies where, you know, there were simply more denser families of enslaved people. And we think, we really do see that there are efforts for people to be buried together in as far as people could control that. And we certainly see that among elite and middling families an effort when they could, to be buried together, to keep their family close. But there's another way in which what I think of as grief genealogy is evident, and that's in textual records, whether people are prompted to start a little reflection, make an entry because they've lost someone, mark things. There's a kind of one extraordinary artifact that always stuck out to me from a very elite family in Boston who had a funeral sermon published printed for them, which, you know, that's a thing that that fancy colonial elite people did, but this particular individual took, first of all had bound a couple of funeral sermons for people who had recently died in his family. And then you can almost feel the intensity of the ink weight as he created hand inked black borders to the pages on these sermons. And they're just so striking. You know, a lot of funeral sermons were printed with black borders, but these are hand inked and you just almost see the grief in that ink. And I think that to me that was really emblematic of the kind of emotional intensity with which people could be producing these kinds of reflections on their family relationships in the midst of these life changes, as you say it.
- [28:31]
B
Yeah, the reflecting on it that I think is a really helpful way of thinking about this. Like this isn't just a list, like a shopping list. There's a lot of emotional weight tied up in this, especially around these kind of life changing moments. What then about nationally changing moments?
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C
Right.
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B
We've talked about sort of British America, but like when the US becomes its own country separate from Britain, do we see any of this change?
- [28:57]
C
I know I keep saying thank you. That's a great question. But it is a great question and it's really an important question too. I think the thing that made me originally wonder about the little Scraps of genealogical information from the 18th century that I was seeing was that so much of the kind of historiography and also even the kind of cultural narrative about the 18th century is about individualism. It's about rising individualism in terms of religious practice. Protestantism, after all, emphasizes the relationship of the individual, the unmediated individual relationship with God. Democracy certainly is about, you know, one man, literally one man, one free property man, one vote, as it were. And there's so much about kind of language, of breaking away from lineage, breaking away from the authority, of connection towards meritocracy, individual achievement and so on. That's a lot of. There's a lot of language around that. And obviously, you know, there's an enormous political change here with the American Revolution that is impossible to ignore. And we can't assume that genealogy as it was practiced under monarchy would be the same, would have the same cultural resonance in a democratic society. But what was astonishing to me is just how much continuity there was, actually. So let me explain that a little bit. Typically, in my experience, when people have thought at all about genealogy as a practice, having a history, they've sort of rooted it in the 19th century. And in the 19th century, we do see the rise of local historical societies, this is true in the US but also in Britain, and then the publishing of family histories and the publishing of local histories. And it seems like that's a kind of flourishing moment for organized genealogy. And so when I began this project, people would say to me, genealogy doesn't begin until the 19th century. And I would say, no, well, not so much. So one of the questions for me became, how do I attach what I was seeing in the 18th century to what I was understanding about and had been told about, had read, of course, about the 19th century, what's happening in the middle there across the American Revolution and the early years of the United States? And. And a couple things to note. One is that the law does not change fundamentally, while obviously the form of government does. The monarchy is cashiered for the United States, but the law of inheritance remains fundamentally the same. Yes, primogeniture is taken out of the law, but primogeniture had not had. Had as strong a hold in the United States as one might think. And there were not so many families that had entailed estates either. So eradicating entail and primogeniture, which Thomas Jefferson was super proud of, he was like, here in the United States, we have revolutionized things by getting rid of these two things. But what they didn't get rid of was the assumption that if a person died, their property would go to their lawfully acknowledged descendants. And that meant in Thomas Jefferson's case, I mean, he was super proud of this in Virginia. He really this, you know, he heralded this achievement of the transition in Virginia law, but it meant that his daughters would inherit. His daughters by his wife, Martha Wales Jefferson, but his children by Sally Hemings, who were enslaved people, of course, would not. So the law of property and inheritance does not change. And we can see that, for example, in the way that American law books continue to basically reproduce the Blackstone, William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Very influential 18th century treatises, which are a lot about inheritance, are reprinted and even modestly revised in the American context post revolution, but they pretty much retain the same structure. Know your genealogy. This is how inheritance works. This is a key fundamental of property, is that you can in fact devise it to your heirs. So it's astonishing how much that doesn't change. So I began to think then, all right, so how do you explain this, this effusion of what people had previously recognized as genealogical production in the 19th century and explain what that might mean? And I began to think that it really has more to do with the development of kind of local organizing and the kind of volunteer kind of organizational movement and the rise of cheap print culture. But it also has to do with a cultural preference for explaining genealogy as a private interest rather than acknowledging it as having a public interest, a public character, and even having a kind of infrastructural presence.
- [34:37]
B
I found this part so fascinating because, of course, so many things do change when the United States becomes independent. And as we're kind of earlier in the book, I was sort of like, well, but this doesn't sounds kind of familiar. Like I can see the link to what happens later. Is there a massive rupture? Right. So of course I wanted to ask you about it and explain like, well, actually in many ways, kind of not, which is really, really interesting to hear about. Is there anything else we haven't discussed yet that especially intrigued you about these threads that you were pulling and putting together that we want to cover?
- [35:09]
C
Well, one thing I would just say is that I think what's made this hard to see and you know, when you've written a book and you've thought about some stuff, of course you think it's clear to you and it's always fun to be in conversation with people because, you know, you get to kind of test out your ideas again. But I think there has long been a kind of idea that, as I said, genealogy is a kind of private practice and only of kind of private interest. I often quote from a relatively recent and Pulitzer Prize winning biography of George Washington, which actually begins on the very first page by saying that George Washington was not interested in his genealogy. And it starts that way because it briefly references his correspondence with Isaac Hurd in order to go on to talk about how Washington is busy doing Washington and presidential things. But in the course of the this, the biographer says that Washington didn't have the vanity or the curiosity or the leisure to pursue his genealogy. And I think that right there summarizes the kind of caricature of genealogy as being this thing that is, you know, just like of private interest, but not having any serious public, political or economic or other weight. And of course we know that's not true, not for Washington and not otherwise.
- [36:40]
B
All sorts of fascinating things then. I was so glad that you kind of put all this together and decided to pursue this project that, as you mentioned, kind of builds out of some of your previous work too. So is that the case going forward? If you have anything you're working on at the moment, is it related or not? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [36:58]
C
Thank you for asking. So I have been working on a very short introduction for Oxford. I don't know if you all are familiar with that series, but it's a lovely series from Oxford, which are literally very short books. And they're actually this lovely kind of small index card size too. They're almost like pocket books on broad topics. And I'm writing one on genealogy, which sort of thinks about the role of genealogy kind of in different places in different times, and thinks about this relationship between produced and extracted genealogies and the public and the private kind of value and what we tell ourselves about genealogy. And I'm working on some related things about family history and how it is that histories of individual families, memoirs of families, writing about families, has often really powerfully illuminated particular historical contexts. And yet it's been quite hard for us to get people to think about family itself as a kind of historical subject, as a historical structure, and not just something that illuminates other kinds of historical structures. So those are some of the things that I'm thinking about now. But as I said, I kind of can't give up on this project ever. Anytime I go into a library or archive, I'm still finding things that intrigue me from 18th century British American genealogical practice. I post those a lot on my Instagram, which is is vernacular genealogy because I just continue to find it utterly intriguing.
- [38:32]
B
Well, for anyone listening who also finds this utterly intriguing, the book we've been discussing is titled Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Karen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [38:46]
C
Thank you so much. Miranda. Thank you for this conversation and for your wonderful questions. Sam.