Reviews of Books

Not Your Grandmother's Genealogy

The Hatch and Brood of Time: Five Phelps Families in the Atlantic World, 1720–1880. By PETER HARING JUDD . (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1999 . Pp. xxxvi, 464. $ 40.00 .)

Reviewed by Karin Wulf, American University

Historians and genealogists do not always enjoy the friendliest of relations. One historian recently complained to me: "The 'genies' get up earlier; they always beat you to the microfilm readers!" More seriously, scholars have often looked askance at the seeming filiopietism of genealogical endeavors. Both The Art of Family and The Hatch and Brood of Time provide good reasons for historians to take a fresh look at genealogy and genealogists. Genealogists, like historians, have been expanding their reach and rethinking their genres. Just as historians are increasingly interested in narrating individual lives, so are genealogists attending to the historical contexts in which their family trees are rooted.

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The essays in The Art of Family represent a collaborative effort among genealogists and scholars (mostly art historians and curators) to explore the material realm of the early New England family. Fifteen essays and a short introduction by John Demos are organized into seven topical sections: "Two Historians' Views on Family History and Genealogy," which includes an essay on family history by Wendell Garrett, editor of The Magazine Antiques, and an essay on "Creating Lineages" by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; "Family Representations and Remembrances"; "Families and Portraiture"; "Representations of Passage"; "Patterns of Inheritance and Acquisition"; "Patterns of Family Legacies"; and "Genealogy and Historical Research." The authors are some of the most prolific and well-cited authorities on domestic material culture, including Jane Nylander, president of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). Appropriately, the first substantive essay is by Peter Benes, director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife. They are joined by specialists on objects with particular genealogical significance: Laurel Gabel on gravestones and Betty Ring on needlework, for example. Prominent curators publishing in this volume include Georgia Brady Barnhill of the American Antiquarian Society on family registers and memorial prints and Barbara McLean Ward and Gerald W. R. Ward, the former of the Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the latter of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, on the meaning and transmission of family silver. Benes and Barnhill have also contributed splendid checklists of manuscript, watercolor, and needlework family registers and family trees, 1780–1846, and printed family registers and memorial prints, 1790–1900 respectively.

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