It's Saturday and if you are ready to get all kinds of festive, head on over to Randy Seaver's place for some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:
1) Find the last genealogy book that you read cover-to-cover. Write a complete source citation, and transcribe the first paragraph of the Introduction.
2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog post, or in a Facebook status or post.
Carolyn Earle Billingsley, Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier (University of Georgia Press, 2004)
Introduction (page 1)
"As historians, our goal is to examine and analyze traces of the past in order to address the present meaningfully by placing it in context. In other words, we hope to understand what humankind and human society have become by comprehending the processes by which we as peoples evolved and constructed our varied cultures. This sentiment has been expressed so often as to become almost trite: William Shakespeare wrote, "What's past is prologue"; "Study the past, if you would divine the future" is attributed to Confucius; and "The past is never dead," according to William Faulkner. "It's not even past." To achieve the goal of mining the past for insights about the present and future, historians employ categories of analysis such as race, class, and gender, but they underutilize, overlook, or even reject a significant piece of the methodological puzzle - kinship."
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