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Reviews of Books
| Our Company Increases Apace: History, Language, and Social Identity in Early Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. By Elinor Abbot. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International, 2007. 275 pages. $25.00 (paper).
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Reviewed by Philip Greven, Rutgers University
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Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of my study Four Generations.1 Now, with the publication of Elinor Abbot's superb reinvestigation of Andover, historians, genealogists, anthropologists, and general readers have an opportunity to expand their knowledge and understanding of an early New England community in countless ways that would not have been possible had they only read my earlier work. By exploring Andover's early history from the perspectives of an anthropologist and a linguist, Abbot challenges many aspects of my portrait of this community. As she observes, "The desire to uncover the direction of deep structural change over time, free from the surface play of historical particulars, is certainly an understandable and worthy goal ... However, for Andover, this approach resulted in an unintended consequence: a misleading picture of the town's early history ... Indeed, it is the historical particulars of Andover that are essential for understanding its people's actions and reactions" (173). Readers of these two books thus will have two contrasting perspectives on a single community in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. |
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Four Generations focused on the long-term processes that transformed the life experiences of Andover's residents, emphasizing changes in patterns of landownership and inheritance; in demographic patterns of births, marriages, and deaths; and in the structures of families living in this rural community over four generations. The historical particulars are evident in the complex ways in which fathers bequeathed their land and property to their children, focusing on the issue of patriarchy and parental control over the lives of their offspring. The book included many stories of individual family interactions and decisions concerning inheritances and the residences of successive generations either in Andover or elsewhere. My reconstruction of life histories was grounded in an extensive analysis of wills and estate inventories as well as life experiences in terms of family size, marriage ages, and longevity. |
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Cumulatively, these details underpinned my arguments about patriarchy and other issues. But at no point did I seek to provide a full history of the settlement of Andover or explore the implications of the diverse backgrounds of the first settlers and latecomers. My doctoral dissertation (which I imagine few have read) explored the first settlers' British roots and their initial choices of residence in New England, but the subsequent book neither included this information nor sought to make use of it. |
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For Abbot these initial life stories are the cornerstone of her very different construction of the early history of Andover and its residents. She focuses on the British roots and ethnic origins of the Andover settlers and the impact on colonial social organization of what they called their companies, the regionally based, multifamily, hierarchical groups they formed in order to undertake migration and settlement. "Would-be colonists, before gathering into and identifying with a company, identified themselves and others by categories of identity and belonging according to what they called their own and one another's blood and country" (24). The twenty-four firstcomers to settle Andover were predominantly from East Anglia, the southwestern counties, and Hertfordshire, with others coming from Scotland and perhaps Wales. It was "the relationships among the Southwesterner families ... and between them and the Hertfordshire group" that "dominated the early history of Andover's social organization" (72). Abbot suggests, "The Old Britons ... found themselves somewhat excluded from civil life, they did not marry with the English, and thus they built up their own neighborhood and interrelations" (72). The initial experiences of these individuals and families in the communities along the New England coast prior to their settlement in Andover thus reflected the complex choices and connections that preceded their rerooting in the remote plantation twenty miles inland. |
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