| Zusammenfassung: | For centuries, genealogical fads with historically distinctive qualities have appeared in disparate societies around the globe; from totalitarian to authoritarian to merely traditional societies, genealogy has served the interest of states that promote the significance of ancestry. We are unused to thinking about genealogy in America and an implicated American state in this context. But in British America an ideological coalition of religion, government, and law—constituent parts of the early modern state—was heavily invested in the authority of lineage and promoted both genealogical literacy and genealogical production. Protestantism, Anglo-American political cultural tradition, and the law all encouraged an understanding of the deep significance of lineal ancestry; each asked for the creation and maintenance of family history. This essay, then, both reveals the extent of intimate expressions of family connection in British America and queries the logic of their production. It centers the state in stories of the family and puts family stories at the center of state interests from the colonial period and into the foundational era of the United States.
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