![sierra generations family tree viewer sierra generations family tree viewer](https://mystrongad.com/BKG_BarkerBuickGMC/BKG_Specials/BKG-Hub-Headeronly-Sierra1500.jpg)
Down to the last week of writing this book I have been faced with mysteries that could not be explained, yet continued to surface. I did not count on having to revise some of my thinking about myself. So this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character.
![sierra generations family tree viewer sierra generations family tree viewer](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0573/7791/5059/products/IMG_20200813_113136_821_1024x1024@2x.jpg)
But I am a journalist who is, like many in my trade, very curious, very stubborn, and able to push keys on a computer for very long hours. I am also not a genealogist, though I am now much more agile in the face of old documents than I once was. So many scenarios came to mind regarding the people no longer visible in those fields, who have since been replaced by machines. Even covering elections in Alabama's Black Belt did not prepare me for the vastness of the Delta's cotton fields. A friend and I drove through two thirds of the state of Mississippi, and were continually awed. But it was cotton that ultimately ruled the lives of the people in this book, and I finally had to go look at some - not the sprigs of wood with cotton bolls and seeds one can buy in florist shops in New York City, but fields of cotton. When I started my research, I knew nothing about how cotton is raised, and began to read about both cotton farming and rice farming because I was unsure which I might need. The Civil War left landmarks all over Virginia, where I grew up, but I never paid much attention to the war's history. This sometimes involved spending five or six hours several times a month to locate where the second baby in the family was born, or dragging behind them during the Civil War, plotting on my own hand-drawn maps of Arkansas which route troops took to attack a small town from its south side. I have tried to stay close to the ground trod by some of the ancestors, clinging to them like a shadow and following their trails through events large and small. Some of these are engaging histories, others offer insightful analyses of the forces at work in our society when masses of people did something in concert - migrations, elections, surviving disasters - and still others have given a window on people in bondage, lives obscured by a paucity of documentation. Historians have written a wealth of texts on every period in this book as well as many of the specific events, even those that may be totally unfamiliar to most of us. Some of the other figures who occasionally ride through on horseback, such as generals of the Confederacy, were fairly easy to look up, and the Civil War being an American obsession, there are a wide range of interpretations of such people and everything they did. Their journeys seem singular and extraordinary to me, yet I cannot believe they were terribly unusual. I was able to learn most about roughly two dozen people who were ordinary Americans of their time. This book concerns only a few of these people the stories their lives left behind have given me an amazing four years. Since January 2001 when I started taking notes for what I thought would be a novel, I have added over 175 people to my family tree, kinfolk no one in my family knew a thing about four years ago. In the process of trying to learn a little about a great-grandfather, I came across a sprawling extended family and a lot of classic Americana - pioneers, Midwest farmers, men who went to the Gold Rush, and southern planters.
![sierra generations family tree viewer sierra generations family tree viewer](https://www.familytreemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/thomas-frost-in-passenger-list.png)
This is a book about real people and some of their experiences from the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century - two families: one black, one white, many of whom never knew each other as well as some of their neighbors, folk whose families lie in graveyards next to the cotton fields they worked. Read an Excerpt from My Confederate Kinfolk: She also wrote the librettos for Amistad and Malcolm X. Among the revelations Davis uncovered was that her ancestors include a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters as well as Africans from Sierra Leone.ĭavis' previous books include the novels 1959 and Maker of Saints. Journalist, novelist and playwright Thulani Davis traces her roots in her new book, My Confederate Kinfolk: a Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. William Argyle Campbell (1852-1902), lived with Curry for the last 20 years of his life. Chloe Tarrant Curry (right) the great grandmother of Thulani Davis, was born into slavery in 1850.