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Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier

Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier
By Carolyn Earle Billingsley

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Trained as both a genealogist and a historian, Carolyn Earle Billingsley shows how the analytic category of kinship can add new dimensions to our understanding of the American South. In Communities of Kinship, she studies a southern family---that of Thomas Keesee Sr.---to show how the biological, legal, and fictive kinship ties between him and some seven thousand of his descendants and relatives helped to shape the growth of the interior South. Keesee, who was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, left there with his family when he was still a boy and subsequently lived in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas.

Drawing on Keesee family history, Billingsley reminds us that, contrary to the accepted notion of rugged individuals heeding the proverbial call of the open spaces, kindred groups accounted for most of the migration to the South’s interior and boundary lands. In addition, she discusses how, for antebellum southerners, the religious affiliation of one’s parents was the most powerful predictor of one’s own spiritual leanings, with marriage being the strongest motivation to change them. Billingsley also looks at the connections between kinship and economic and political power, offering examples of how Keesee family members facilitated and consolidated their influence and wealth through kin ties.

Piecing together a wide assortment of public and private records that pertain to the Keesee family and shed light on naming practices, residential propinquity, migration patterns, economic and political dealings, and religious interactions, Billingsley offers a model of innovation and subtle analysis for historians. This important new study makes a persuasive case that kinship, particularly in the study of the antebellum South, should be considered a discrete category of analysis complementary to, and potentially as powerful as, race, class, and gender.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #305508 in Books
  • Published on: 2004-08-31
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 232 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Blood ties, as historically invisible and intricately twisted as strands of DNA, have always been the building blocks of society. In Communities of Kinship, Billingsley maps one strand of the social genome that created the American South, demonstrating why historians will never truly understand society until they genealogically study the individual families who are the genes within the common body."--Elizabeth Shown Mills, Samford University Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research


"Billingsley's book accomplishes what previous studies of antebellum southern kinship stop short of doing by going beyond the borders of one community and state to examine how kinship and the process of migration shaped one another. Her focus on a single family and its thousands of descendants not only traces the role kinship played over an extended period of time and over an extended area, but also provides a valuable methodological bridge between genealogists and historians."--Robert C. Kenzer, author of Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849-1881


"In this fascinating work from start to finish, Billingsley presents her argument, expertly develops the theory, methodology, and evidence, and strongly supports the whole with the Keese family study. Communities of Kinship is for the scholar—historical or genealogical—who hopes, as the author does, that the book will become a 'starting point [for] an ongoing discussion of the place of kinship in historical inquiry.'"--National Genealogical Quarterly


"This book is full of insights. Billingsley's rehabilitation of genealogical methods is as passionate as it is convincing."--Florida Historical Quarterly


"Well written and carefully researched and organized, Communities of Kinship makes a strong case for the value of kinship studies to historical research."--Lauren Ashley Laumen, East Texas Historical Association


“Her case for the extensive character of the kinship connections and patterns that helped frame the lives of the white southerners is persuasive, as is her argument that serious genealogical work can effectively reveal connections and patterns likely to remain hidden in other kinds of historical research."--Arkansas Historical Quarterly


"Convincingly argues that by combining the methodical approaches of each discipline to study kinship, historians can gain a better understanding of families and society."--South Carolina Historical Magazine


"The rigor of the research methodology is impressive. . . . She argues convincingly that genealogy offers some useful and underutilized tools for professional historians."--Alabama Review

From the Publisher
An important new study of how familial connections impelled and influenced the peopling of the South

About the Author

Carolyn Earle Billingsley earned her doctorate in southern history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She now lives in Alexander, Arkansas, where she works as an independent historian and professional genealogist.

Customer Reviews

Major Breakthrough in Historiography5
Dr. Carolyn Earle Billingsley has made a major breakthrough in American, especially Southern, historiography. She has elevated genealogy into the first rank of scholarly tools for understanding society and what springs from it. In the process she has overturned former conclusions as to how the Southern frontier was settled and developed. The core element is communities of kinship.

They have been right under our noses all along. Although writers have noted the importance of kinships episodically, they have explored them indifferently. It is common practice for biographers to devote a few pages to family background but little more. One extraordinary exception was Robert A. Caro who described President Johnson's families and environment in the Texas Hill Country in vivid detail. You could almost see little Lyndon as an incipient statesman. A friend wisely observed, though, that we do not know what cultural baggage those families brought to those hills and where they got it.

Dr. Billingsley's process opens up vast possibilities for research among families and persons for whom manuscript and printed documentation is skimpy or virtually non-existent, which is to say, most of them. As a longtime manuscript librarian I know how spotty the records are. Many a worthy in his or her time is now unknown when the opposite was the case in their own time and place.

Dr. Billingsley has not only theorized about the process but also demonstrated it in a study of a migrating, changing community of kinship, one without much documentation beyond genealogy. She has shown us how to do it. She has identified the core element of Southern society that defined its culture, politics, economics, and religion. As she noted, church history is incomplete if you are unaware of the familial interconnections of the clergy among themselves and communities of kinship.

Reading this book, I felt like I was reading about my own community of kinship, a most useful term, from Virginia and, especially South Carolina, to Alabama and westward. Our complex was quite larger and more concentrated in one region. In our principal county, the metropolis of Birmingham rose among us. Large numbers of us stayed and, having developed a rural society from scratch, participated in making a city.

Perhaps her Earles connect to our Earles in South Carolina and Alabama, two galaxies touching at the edges. One of our prominent relatives was a neighbor of her kinship community in Bibb County, Alabama. Cases in point!