Tangled Journeys: One Family's Story and the Making of American History

The intimate stories of families generally remain undocumented and untold after the passage of a few generations. When family members carefully preserve documents, letters, and scraps of paper from the past, even when that family is neither extraordinary nor famous, they show an awareness of having a past and an identity. For historians, a large multigenerational collection is both a blessing and a curse, because every family also leaves silences and whispers among the documents. In this beautifully written book, Lori D. Ginzberg challenges historians “to stretch meaning from the silences, and to listen more closely to the whispers” as she uncovers the “tangled journeys” of the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew family (p. 203). No individual in the five generations of the family stands out as a history maker. The group exemplifies the upwardly striving American middle-class family. Together, they become actors in a remarkable sweeping story pieced together by a gifted storyteller. While the family collection of letters, certificates, bills of sale, concert programs, and odd bits was a treasure trove for Ginzberg, huge gaps remained. Ginzberg plodded through genealogy and census records to pin down all the players in this multigenerational drama, beginning with John Stevens and Mary Stevens, who migrated from London in the 1750s to St. Kitts to Georgia and then to Charleston. Deftly re-creating the transatlantic world of eighteenth-century trade, with its sordid underside of human traffic, Ginzberg shows how easily a family from England became enmeshed in slave trading and slave owning. Settling in Charleston in the 1760s, the Stevens family continued its search for respectability—John through trade and Mary by establishing a coffeehouse.