LEGACY

A businessman explores his family tree and ancestors’ connections to the events of American history.

With a father who died as a young man and a mother who left scant records, author MacDonald began researching his ancestry a decade ago. After “a long process with many dead ends, wrong turns, and misinformation,” this author uncovered a rich history of MacDonald’s predecessors that includes Pilgrims in New England, early immigrants to the Virginia Colony, Native Americans, and Revolutionary War veterans. He contextualizes these ancestors within the larger narrative of American history, claiming, “the story of my family is in many respects the story of America.” MacDonald’s historical analysis celebrates the role of immigrants in U.S. history as it documents the contributions of Jews, Latinos, and Eastern Europeans to America’s growth in the 19th and 20th centuries; it also acknowledges the violence and trauma inflicted upon Indigenous people and African Americans. The bulk of the book, however, explores MacDonald’s personal family tree and is divided between his father’s and mother’s sides. What he found was an eclectic mix of early European Americans who, for instance, included both those who “owned plantations and slaves” and fought for the Confederacy as well as those who “opposed slavery and fought a war to abolish slavery.” While often hagiographic in tone, the strength of the book lies in its genealogical research that pays equal attention to both men and women. A former CEO, MacDonald’s research team was led by professional genealogist Susan Zoby-Wilkinson, who provides future researchers with detailed family trees and genealogical profiles of 50-plus individuals. The author of multiple nonfiction works, MacDonald is a skilled writer who weaves an engaging narrative that blends his family tree with historical trends. While genealogists will find valuable new research, the book’s broader historical analysis, whose endnotes too often rely on Wikipedia, is fairly simplistic and lacks the nuance one would expect in a more conventional history book. Includes appendices, photographs, endnotes, and color images.

An impressively researched genealogy whose wider historical analysis falls short.