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

by Carolyn Earle Billingsley

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."

Genres: History

232 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2004

About the author

Carolyn Earle Billingsley was a noted historian and author who worked to connect the fields of history, anthropology, and genealogy. The founding editor of the journal of the Saline County History and Heritage Society, she received the Booker Worthen Literary Prize in 2005 for her book Communities of Kinship.

She was an avid genealogist and did extensive research on her family and for others. She was a founding member of the Saline County History and Heritage Society. After her children were grown, at age 41, she decided to go to college where she prospered, graduating from the University of Arkansas-Little Rock with honors, maintaining a 4.0 grade point average, studied in Austria as a Fulbright Scholar, then earned her doctorate degree from Rice University.

Billingsley taught as an adjunct faculty member the history department at UA Little Rock, served on the board of directors of the Association of Professional Genealogists in 2008–2009 and the Arkansas Genealogical Society from 1989 to 1996 (including serving as board vice president in 1989–1990 and president in 1991–1993), and was course coordinator for the Research in the South program of the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research from 2007 to 2010.

Reviews

[Kathy KS · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enlightening work that brings together history, genealogy, and anthropology to follow one family's migration from North Carolina to Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. This study is about "kin" moving together, not just nuclear families. I've found several of the lines I've been researching that do this same thing, just not in the South. Using only surname studies misses many of those families that marry into the family and their extended networks.

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation.

[Tyler Brannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A 2004 history dissertation on applying genealogical research techniques to the history of the Antebellum South. There is some neat data hidden in the repetitive and formulaic phrasing of this academic work, but not enough for me to recommend this work to anyone not already enthralled by the topic.

[Mhd]

Led to this book by speaker at RootsTech 2020.

[Mark Cheathem]

Thought-provoking call for historians to understand and incorporate genealogy and kinship in studies. While some of Billingsley's observations are important, she sometimes repeats herself. The parade of names also gets a bit much at times. I think she might have been better served to do a comparative analysis of several families, but that would likely have broadened her scope too much.