I think many of us think about genealogy as a contemporary practice, and one of my goals

in lineage is to get folks to think about genealogy as having a much longer, deeper history

in America, but also of having some kind of particular qualities. Genealogy has

this critical kind of two-edged quality. It is both about emotional impact and instrumental

purpose for institutions like governments and other institutions like the church. And it can be

instrumental for those families too.

I'm Karen Wolf, and I'm the director and librarian at the John Carter Brown Library

and a professor of history at Brown University.

I'm a historian of vast early America.

I'm so happy to have my new book, Lineage, Genealogy, and the Power of Connection in

early America out this year. One of the most surprising was coming across the family tree

that George Washington drew when he was quite a young man. The Washington piece really floored

me, partly because there's so little from Washington's early years, secondly,

because it wasn't well documented this particular item. It wasn't in the papers of George Washington.

It wasn't particularly well cataloged at the Library of Congress where it is. So it hadn't played

any kind of role in understanding or interpreting Washington, and it's just such a stunning piece

because on one side of this piece of paper is this family tree that he drew, and on the other

is a list of people who were enslaved, and that he would come to own as a result of the family

relationships and the inheritance that he drew on the other side. Lineage helps us to see family

history as something quite important, not marginal, not benign, but something quite important

that sits at the center of people's experience in early America. Lineage is not a book that is

about elites, though it is that too.

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