In Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, author Karin Wulf studies how genealogy shaped power, identity, and community in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Moving beyond the assumption that genealogy is only about family pride or personal heritage, Wulf reveals that lineage served as a critical social, religious, and political tool in early America. Her work explores how people used ancestry to claim rights, secure property, assert authority, and reinforce boundaries of race, gender, and class.
Wulf includes substantial discussion of how colonial and early American laws tied identity to family lines. This was especially evident in the institution of slavery, where descent through the mother legally determined enslavement. Wulf shows that this practice turned genealogy into a mechanism of control, making it central to the development of racial hierarchies, especially in the South.
The author balances her analysis of early American leaders such as George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin with a focus on the more ordinary practices of family record keeping. She draws from diaries, legal documents, and many family Bibles to show how people recorded and preserved their connections, often in ways that shaped their futures and those of their descendants. Wulf closes her book with the development of the Mormon faith and its extensive use of genealogy and the eventual development of apps and websites that help us track long lost family members.
While the book is dense in places and the visual reproductions of documents can be hard to read, Lineage is a valuable contribution to the history of early America and of the subject of genealogy.
MY RATING: 4
