Karin Wulf

A quick tidbit here about this bit of court documentation– a recognizance for Susannah Williams of Raynham in Bristol County, Massachusetts.

Earlier this month I was back at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, to speak about my book Lineage and the history of genealogy in early America at Swem Library.

When I make a list of issues I care most about as a historian, footnotes are at the top.

Uh oh.

It’s beyond fun to get to talk with you about Lineage, about how genealogy works and about your own experiences.

Making connections in the eighteenth century was often about making family connections.

Every item on the cover is special but, as I’ve noted before, often the aesthetic pleasures of the objects can mask the pain or violence of a family experience.

This extraordinary piece is both one of the originating points of my research for Lineage and also one of the most surprising things I found in my last rounds of research for the book.

I took this picture of Sintha Peck’s gravestone in Old Ashford Cemetery in Ashford, Connecticut, on a chilly winter’s day a couple of years ago.

Regular readers will know that a challenge/ joy of working on my new book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America is that I cannot seem to stop the research.