Regular readers will know that a challenge/ joy of working on my new book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America is that I cannot seem to stop the research. Since I finished the book, which to be clear took a long time, I’ve continued to amass material but also to extend and deepen some of the arguments and perspectives developed there. Such is the case with my work on William Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Laws of England. Originally published in 4 volumes between 1765-1769 by Oxford University Press, where he was on the board, the Commentaries almost immediately raced into new editions in England and abroad. Including in the British colonies in North America, where Robert Bell published the first American edition in Philadelphia, by subscription, beginning in 1771.
Why am I recounting the publication history of Blackstone? Albeit one of the most important publications in the British American world in the eighteenth century, and still cited in legal opinions today, what does it have to do with Lineage? Well, a lot. And even more than I wrote about in the book.
One of Blackstone’s primary emphases is in fact genealogy and the importance of tracing kinship to determine inheritance. This emphasis is illustrated, literally, in the family tree of the fictional Stiles family that was created to support Blackstone’s many examples of family relationships bearing on complex inheritance situations. This lineage was reproduced in the American editions of Blackstone, importantly for my interests in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but also later. This is something I wrote about at some length in Lineage, but have extended in a new essay that will appear in an edited collection edited by historians Sara Georgini and Tom Cutterham.
(The image on the cover of Lineage is from the John Carter Brown Library first edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries. Yes, I prefer to cite and reproduce the JCB’s copies whenever possible!)