Jane Aldrich just pointed out that the distinguished genealogist Michael Hait recently discussed my work in his blog:

http://michaelhait.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/genealogy-and-history/

Hait makes some astute observations about the relationship between the craft of the professional historian and that of the professional genealogist.  Historians, he suggest, tend to abstract out from specific cases to infer general patterns, flattening out many of the intricate, rich details to family histories. Genealogists are of course oriented towards the marvelous complex and variable details of given cases. He kindly points to The Accidental Slaveowner as illustrating the potential synthesis of historical and genealogical approaches. I’m thrilled by this; it puts me in mind of the old dictum, so beloved by anthropologists, that “General Forms reveal themselves in Minute Particulars.”

Given my background as a social anthropologist, trained to be attentive to the precise details of kinship in African social fields, I was certainly predisposed when I began this research to plunge into the full complexities of specific genealogical histories. But I must admit that the skill set required for this research was new to me. I am familiar with eliciting kinship and descent data as well as kinship terminology from real live people in the field.  But I knew precious little about how to go about reconstructing the linked matrices of white and enslaved kinship networks from the documentary record.  My ‘on the job training’ has come for numerous librarians and archivists, as well as generous professional and amateur genealogists encountered in libraries, court houses and archives across the country. They have patiently walked me through the ‘tricks of the trade,’ carefully collating censuses, company ledgers, baptismal registers, tax records, wills and loose probate documents,  land plats, bank records, real estate deeds (which sometimes include transfers of slaves) and all sorts of other instruments I’d hardly known about.  The work has at times been tedious of course, but ultimately has been thrilling, as the overall shape of intertwined family histories (white and black, free and enslaved) has gradually become apparent.