Found this article of interest.
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species that had to adapt to the harsh reality of frontier life in order to survive, with survival being dependent on mutual co-operation and alliances within their ranks – the concept of individual advancement through social enterprise’.
‘The vital importance of kinship support in England and colonial America is well documented. Neel stated: ‘Marriage is not simply the union of two persons; rather, it binds together two kin groups. It reunites human society, which time and the divergence of family lines relentlessly pull asunder’ (1), a point elucidated by Pounds: ‘Even the state in medieval England required people to be linked in small groups or tithings, so that each could vouch for the others’ good behaviour. Almost everyone is, by the accident of birth, a member of a family, of a more extended kinship group (2). Such social-dependency arrangements were repeated by American settler families, as exampled by Doyle: ‘The listing of people, their names and birthplaces in the census rolls, shows clusters of fellow North or South Carolinians, Virginians, and Tennesseans living next to one another … The family names listed in the census suggest that kinship groups were being transplanted, either at once or in stages … letters and diaries reveal brief glimpses of the vast undergrowth of siblings, cousins and in-laws that existed beneath the moving population … These kinship networks among the elite were only the more visible of a much larger complex of relations that pulled kin and family across vast American distances to be with one another’ (3). Hofstra commented on the depth of marriages within kinship groups: ‘All of 22 Scots-Irish settlers from eleven nuclear families that had acquired land around Hite’s holdings were related. In nearly four out of every five marriages, children of these pioneering families found mates among these or other Scots-Irish families living nearby’ (4), and Majewski pointed ou their evolvement into ever larger entities: ‘Constant intermingling of the same families in the same neighborhoods produced increasingly large kinship groups’ (5). Hendricks studied the importance of kinship groups in a specific area of settlement: ‘Family connections and kinship groups were very important to the settlement of … land south of the James River’ (6).
To not take account of the importance of the kinship group in the settlement of seventeenth-century Virginia is akin to studying biology without a microscope.
(1) Carol Neel, Medieval Families, Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, p. 200, 2004. (2) J. G. Pounds, The Culture of the English People, p. 255, 1994. (3) Don Harrison Doyle, ‘Faulkner’s County’, p. 255, 1994. (4) Warren R. Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley, p. 39, 2003. (5) John Majewski, ‘A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia, p. 17, 2000. (6) Christopher E. Hendricks, The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia, p. 52, 2006.
Thinking of you, Karl David Wright!
