Kindred Spirits: Four Hundred Years of an American Family

Kindred Spirits is an engaging memoir about family and an urgent quest for identity—uncovering the deep ancestral history of one ordinary-seeming American family whose past is revealed with unprecedented sweep, detail, and clarity.

Bellamy's genealogical odyssey will be a revelation to anyone interested in his or her own family story or to anyone who has ever wondered what it would mean to meet one’s ancestors. Scientific advances such as DNA testing and recent opportunities via internet research have given genealogy and family history new credibility that has made it the second most popular subject area on the internet after pornography—and an obsession with baby-boomers.

In describing the phenomenon of the new genealogy, and employing its methods, Bellamy tells a captivating story about the struggles of the earliest European pioneers to gain a foothold in the New World and combines this story with a personal narrative of unusual candor and interest.

This is a book about a quest—set off by the death of a beloved mother—for the facts about her family’s past and that of her deceased husband. What it uncovers is the deep ancestral history of one ordinary-seeming American family whose past is revealed with unprecedented sweep, detail, and clarity. The son who spends his bereaved hours searching for clues in court houses, libraries, cemeteries, and on the internet, finds more than he ever bargained for—a past that no one in the family ever knew before or ever could have known without the resources now available for unearthing the past.

Bellamy’s genealogical odyssey will be a revelation to anyone interested in his or her own family story and to anyone who has ever wondered what it would mean to meet one’s ancestors close up. Kindred Spirits tells a captivating story about the struggles of the earliest European colonists to gain a foothold in the New World and combines this story with a personal narrative of unusual candor and interest.