AHA Session 231
Saturday, January 6, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Franciscan D (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Nicole Maskiell, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Panel:
Leila K. Blackbird, University of Chicago
Jared Ross Hardesty, Western Washington University
Andrea Catharina Mosterman, University of New Orleans
Karin Wulf, Brown University and the John Carter Brown Library
Danielle Terrazas Williams, University of Leeds
Session Abstract
This roundtable explores how family history and genealogy can be used to gain a deeper understanding of “Vast Early America” through the lives of the varied peoples who inhabited it. As a concept, Vast Early America decenters narratives focusing solely on Anglo-American colonial origins to better historize the many peoples who comprised and contested early America’s diverse geographies. This panel contends the field is further enriched through the study of families and family history. Throughout early America, genealogy and family networks proved highly important. Kinship was often carefully recorded in notarial, sacramental, judicial, and personal records, revealing how relationships were both reinforced and displaced through trade, communication, gift giving, intermarriage, and enslavement. While this research proves more challenging for those whose family histories were disrupted or genealogies unpreserved, focus on the interconnectivity of historical actors and their communities also proves crucially important to reconstructing what has been lost. An in-depth exploration of these connections provides a deeper and more nuanced understanding of early America.
Roundtable participants will discuss the various ways in which they use genealogy and family history to study these connections. Focusing on seventeenth-century Mexico, Danielle Terrazas Williams discusses how Agustina de Acosta, a free parda in central Veracruz, secured a legacy of relative comfort for her daughter and other family members, underscoring the methodological and theoretical value of tracing the biographical notes about individual women. Andrea Mosterman explores the importance of genealogical recordkeeping for New Netherland's first enslaved families. But by the eighteenth century, Dutch descendants no longer recorded such information for the people they enslaved, purposefully disconnecting them from their kin in the records they produced. Karin Wulf discusses how diverse British Americans recorded and researched their family histories. In doing so, she shows the foundational importance of family and family history throughout British America. Jared Hardesty uses genealogical research on the affluent New England Mackintosh sisters to explore the deeply interconnected histories of slavery, property holding, and family formation in the early modern Atlantic. Leila K. Blackbird examines how family history can serve as a tool of repair for the descendants of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people who were enslaved in Louisiana’s French and Spanish periods, as well as for tribal nations that have been denied federal recognition in the Gulf South.
Bringing together historians studying early America in all its vastness, this roundtable explores the importance of family history and genealogy, and it seeks to address three questions: First, how does centering family history in the study of early America change how scholars consider the field? Second, how can the inclusion of genealogical research change our understanding of places, people, and phenomena that have been long studied? And finally, what does studying early American genealogical records reveal about the importance of kin, clans, and connections in communities? These questions will allow the panel to have a wide-ranging conversation about and encourage audience participation in an important conversation in the historiography of Vast Early America.
