Customer Reviews

Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I don't think Linda Matthews' book would appeal to many readers, but for those who enjoy family histories, with a little social commentary thrown into the mix, I can highly recommend it. Matthews, interested in her father's family history after receiving notebooks he and his sister had put together, traces the Hammell family from its beginning - seemingly - in Norman France. The family first settled in southern Scotland, and then when opportunity struck, moved to the Ulster counties of Northern Ireland. Then, in the 1600's, they took advantage of opportunities in the American colonies, and settled, and for the most part, prospered in the Maryland/Virginia areas near what is now Washington DC. Finally, after the Civil War, Matthews' great-grandfather, Hugh Hammell, left Virginia and, after a short stop in Kansas, finally settled in Washington State. Her book ends with her grand-father's generation.

Matthews calls her book "Middling Folk" because she believes that her father's family has always been middle-class. Never particularly wealthy, most members of the Hammill family were educated, from their days in Scotland and Ireland. Their education gave them an entree, in most cases, into middle-class professions. Most were businessmen - women never worked outside the home - working as mill owners, teachers, lawyers, ministers, hotel owners. A couple of the men were quite successful for their times, but losing much of their wealth due to conditions outside their control. One lived in contested territory in Northern Virginia during the Civil War. Another opened up a mill in Washington State and depended on grain to mill from land not suited to raise grain.

One very interesting point was the very randomness of life in past centuries. One family did quite well in Virginia in the 18th century. They had nine children,but only ONE survived the deaths of his siblings from diseases and the fatal accidents of farm living common in the times. And, the survivor, Hugh, lost his first wife and only child to disease. It would seem the family line would be lost, but Hugh, at the age of 50, married a second time and fathered two healthy sons, before dying a few years later. It was the sons from this late marriage who would continue the line to Matthews' family.

Matthews uses family records and public records as much as possible (the state of Virginia, for instance, lost many of their public records after the Civil War and in the early 20th century). She also writes clearly marked "fictional vignettes" in the voices of - possible - family members and friends. I think she's a good enough writer that they added, rather than detracted, from her book.

One of the problems about reading an "uncorrected proof" of a book is often the absence of supplemental material often included in the final, printed edition. In Matthews' book, I was pleased to see the maps and some pictures included in the book, but not the family tree that will be later included. I'm a "map-addict" and having the maps helped me with the story.

This is not at all what I expected. I thought it would be written more like a nonfiction novel rather than a history timeline. The author is writing about her own family history & using the info. she gathered from her family. She goes back very far. I'm sure to her, the story is extremely interesting. After all, it is in a way about her.
My problem is it reads as a choppy broken History lesson. I guess this is because she doesn't have all the information. She admits that she adds in fiction to fill in the gaps to make it more interesting. I thought this would add to the book & make it more enjoyable. When I got to her first fiction part, I didn't care for the way it was put in the book & I don't feel it went with it. It was like suddenly having a little story in the middle of all these dates & clipped bits of info. It just didn't flow. She clearly indicates that what you are reading is her little interpretation of how she feels things might have been when she fills in the gap. Anyway, I gave up. Simply not my cup of tea & I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

In Middling Folk, Linda Matthews tells the story of her middle class family from their roots in Scotland, through immigration to colonial America and life in Virginia through the Civil War and final settlement in Washington State in the latter part of the 19th Century. While not a scholarly work, it does show extensive research. The author does quite a bit of speculation on events based on small details discovered in records but makes a point to identify speculation. The short sections where she writes first person narratives for past figures are mildly entertaining but neither add or detract from the overall story.

I particularly liked the section on the family's time in Prince William County, VA. I recently relocated to Price William County myself and find the bits of local history bring the area to life.

Matthews makes no pretentions that her family is anything but middle class, which makes the book all the better. She shows the little places where her family has left a lasting memory such as a park named for the family's mill or an old plaque in an even older church in Charles County, MD. She does nothing to hide her ancestors' slave ownership but uses it to show their failings, the same as their 18th and 19th Century neighbors in Maryland and Virginia. What Matthews does accomplish is to make an entertaining story out of her otherwise unremarkable family which goes to show that with the right presentation, any of our families is worthy of a history. An entertaining read.

Anyone who loved Laurel Ulrich's "A Midwife's Tale" will love this book.

Middling Folk, if anything, is an even more remarkable feat: the author reconstructs past worlds at every stop of her family, from Scotland and Ireland in the 17th century, to Maryland and Virginia in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the Pacific Northwest, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Ulrich, Matthews constructs some worlds, especially the earlier ones, from often slender evidence, meticulously presented and interpreted. The author is a remarkable detective; she lays out her evidence with enormous care and lets us into her thinking before she draws a conclusion. So we have the pleasure of observing both the process and the outcome of historical thinking. The only "novelization" is set apart typographically from the rest of the text--brief and brilliant forays into the mind of one of the people she has been describing, bringing into vivid focus a critical moment along the route of the family's migration. Their lives are played out against the sweep of history, which she sketches with remarkable economy, giving us a clear sense of the forces that shape their lives and propel them forward.

The author's voice is crisp, witty, and unsentimental, yet passionately engaged with her subject. Her prose evokes a powerful sense of place, as if you are standing beside her looking out at the same landscapes. Why should we care about the Hammill family she is reconstructing from legal documents, ruins of homesteads, place-names, and cemeteries? Because they are like us. Their motivations are our motivations; we recognize them as ourselves. Not the romance of kings and queens and military leaders leading lives of unimaginable splendor and power, which, of course, has its own appeal; but ordinary folk engaging in the smaller miracles of creating something out of nothing; who have the vision to see in a waterway a livelihood--the means to build a mill, support a family, and provide a staple to the communities that grew up around them. It's a remarkable story really, of courageous "middling folk" who set down roots time and again, then moved on, driven by opportunity, loss, or pure restlessness. By the end, even though three centuries have elapsed, the time seems to telescope. Those distant ancestors do not seem so remote; their struggles are familiar. We see family customs, traits, and motivations--even attachment to similar landscapes--resurface in generation after generation. Watching all those generations move quickly by, the reader comes away with a sense of life's brevity, as well as the cumulative power and weight of the past in the present, even if we don't attend to it.

Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, migration, emigration, westward movement

While other reviewers complained that this family saga wasn't exciting enough, I found a lot of interest in the listing of ordinary household items, ordinary entries into court records, etc. The fact is that most people live ordinary middling lives, and that is what Linda Mathews is portraying, that the fabric of America is made up of middle class people each with their family traditions, histories, hopes and fears, and that these threads weave together the exciting blend of American life. I like that she stuck the factual, and only in side ventures went off on a tangent of imagination. Truth is, the imagined dialogues were not that interesting. What was interesting was the migration of the people, the names that popped up, the intangibles that are passed down from generation to generation, such as preferences for homesites, careers, names.

I was really glad I took a chance on this title. I can honestly say I've never read anything quite like it, as the author is a descendant of the people she is writing about, and she mixes in interesting, quirky, and funny observations along with the historical narrative. This gives the book a charming quality. It was also something really different for me to read about "ordinary" and "everyday" people rather than "important" historical people and events. It was enlightening to read about people who just were trying to improve their lot in life, and to provide a good future for their loved ones....rather than about people who were trying to accomplish grand things thru political intrigue and war. It was very enjoyable to read about the author's ancestors trying to maintain a normal life during difficult times throughout the period she covers, both in Europe and America: (Charles I vs. Cromwell; The Glorious Revolution: The American Revolution; The American Civil War, etc.) As the author covers a long period of time, from the 1600's to the 1900's, and as the action moves from Western Scotland, to Northern Ireland, to Maryland, Virginia and, finally, Washington state, the book always pulls you in and remains fresh. The only thing that prevents me from rating the book 5 stars is that Ms. Matthews sometimes gets caught up too much in the minutiae of her research...property sales, acreage, deed transfers, and the like. But this is a minor criticism. Overall, she has come up with something interesting and refreshingly different from the run-of-the-mill history book. Not an easy thing to do! This book is well-worth your time.

A well-researched book, mostly interesting to those who are part of her family, or who are Scots-Irish, as many Americans are. Although genealogy is usually only interesting to those sharing a history, Matthews choice to patch holes in the research through reasoned guessing and imagination is an interesting route. Not solid for those interested only in facts, but a reasoned choice for someone trying to understand the story of one's own family. Although others have objections, I find it acceptable because Matthews makes it very clear about where she does it and why. It gave me new inspiration on researching and thinking about my own family's various interwoven narratives, since I have Scots-Irish on both sides of my family.

The other thing I like about this book is that it breaks up the stereotype that all Scots-Irish families were passionate hooligans, soldiers, frontier heros, renegades and ruffians, such characters the populate books such as James Webb's Born Fighting. Matthews' ancestors were about as mild and conventional and "normal" as they come. And this "middling folk" character continued into her family today.

In addition, we aren't as individualistic as we like to believe we are. The central consumeristic religion of "me" and "how special we are" in modern America is ultimately delusional. Her conclusion says it all.

"Family culture is deeply conservative. It perpetuates itself across political upheavals and vast demographic shifts, despite the social mobility that Americans so prize. In politics, religion, naming, and habits --extravagance or frugality, persistence of volatility, belligerence or mildness-- parents pass their preferences to their children, often without a word. Children absorb them, and they become the values that shape generations. These preferences or assumptions resist analysis. Like air and water, they are nearly invisible, yet our lives are built around them" (p. 329).

I might have given it five stars for being such an engaging study, but I don't know how the final book will look, or the illustrations and maps, etc., since I reviewed an uncorrected proof (which seems to be the trend these days); however as a bibliophile and artist I like books as much for their "feel" and their aesthetics, so I can't assess that part of the product and have to hold back a star.

On its face, this book is one family's history, chronicled by one of its present-day members. Ms. Matthews has done a considerable amount of primary research in tracing the Hammills from their origins in Scotland, to northern Ireland, and then on through colonial Maryland, to Virginia, and then on to Washington State in the waning years of frontier life. She went through a daunting number of county trial records, land records, newspaper clippings - all the fragments of ordinary lives that turn up in archives. That she was able to organize this and tell a coherent, even compelling story, says much for her writing and editing skill.

And the records are incomplete: the Hammills lived in times of war and revolution in 17th Century Ulster, in the American revolution and civil war, and their families and property - and the archives that recorded them - were often in peril. Many of the records didn't survive. She skillfully fills in the gaps, sometimes with educated guesses, sometimes with fictional letters written with a plausibility that never rings false. While none of the Hammills were famous in war or business, and only (if unlucky) on the fringes of history, they lived out fairly orderly and prosperous lives, and even the mundane parts come out here with a warmth and a genuine human interest.

This book is something more than a descendant's family history, nor is it fiction even in the conjectured parts. The Hammills were typical enough to stand for all the Scots-Irish families who settled down in colonial America, built the new land's industries, survived its wars and depressions, down to the present day. This book can serve as a typical sample of how they, how we, lived.

Worthwhile for those interested in Americana and in American social history.

"Middling Folk" tells the story of one family that represents the experience of a large swath of Americans--the common folk of the South. Linda Matthews traces her family back to the British isles through early America, Civil War Virginia and then to the Pacific northwest. The family is not one that made headlines in US history, but their experience is indicative of how a great many Americans lived their lives. They were hardworking small farmers, occasionally doing a little better, but usually living solid respectable lives in comfortable surroundings. Many of them can best be described by a word too seldom used today--"decent." Matthews tells her story by combining historical discussions (based on solid research) and "stories" written to probe deeper into the minds of figures in the book. She carefully sets off the "stories" from the historical text, but I found them to be intriguing and often more provocative than the "facts." I highly recommend this book about an American family and hope more works of this type--investigating common Americans will appear. Anyone who has enjoyed Rick Bragg's family books or the history by such authors as Frank Owsley (Plain Folk of the Old South) will enjoy this book.

Linda H. Matthews is a gifted historian who decided to find the roots of her "Hammill" family tree and while doing so, she wrote this book, Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family, detailing her discoveries. By doing this, she artfully recreates the lives and times of a Scots-Irish family going back 400 years and tells the tale of what brought them to America from their European home-lands. We learn with Matthews how this family came with the early 1700's wave of immigrants to become middle-class Americans settling first as farmers, and then they went on to become land-owners and businessmen as they took on roles in the revolutionary and civil wars. Matthews' diligent research enabled her to skillfully take the reader through the social and economic changes that occurred within the family from a period when they used slave labor, to the industrialization of their means to make a living.

Sometimes the reader will find themselves lost in the tracings of all the generations of the Hammill's from when they first settled in the Chesapeake Bay area and later migrated to Washington State in the early 1900's. The work would be greatly sharpened if the author would include a Genealogy Chart in the published edition for ready reference -- a needed help for the reader to track this fascinating family lineage. (The version of the book that I have is an un-corrected proof made available to Amazon-Vine reviewers).

The book brought two discoveries or connections to me:
1) a tie to Lewis County Washington (where Mathew's great-grandfather settled) was also the county my uncle's father, Ernest Nebergall, was the first school teacher. (That 1907 school was constructed of unpeeled logs and the cracks were chinked with moss -- all built in Packwood, Washington)
2) the author is related to George Soule, a passenger on the Mayflower (of the Pilgrims), and since my mother's family can also be traced back to George Soule, that makes me related to this author.

Interesting information and connections to my roots, made this enjoyable. Details made this a bit to wade through at times.