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The Color of Family

History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry

A uniquely blended personal family history and history of the changing definitions of race in America.
 
A zealous eugenicist ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.
 
This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.
 
Combining the history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.

336 pages | 34 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2024

Biography and Letters

Black Studies

History: American History

Law and Legal Studies: Law and Society

Reviews

The Color of Family is at once an immediately engaging account of an Irish and Virginian family history and a compelling critique of the work of producing and policing racial categories through official records of individual identity. Through his stories and documents, O’Malley both confronts the commodification of genealogical sources and offers a profoundly important message about the fiction and effects of race.”

Catherine Nash, author of Genetic Geographies

“A compelling glimpse of major themes in US history through the tangled branches of one family tree. O’Malley writes beautifully in that zone where street-level, lived experience intersects with broader structures of society, ideology, and governance. This is historical writing at its best.”

Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness of a Different Color

“O’Malley’s Color of Family will intrigue anyone interested in genealogy, family history, or historians’ methods. The many blind corners and unexpected turns in this account of a historian’s genealogical research compel the reader to hold on even more tightly to O'Malley’s clear and vivid storytelling.”

Francesca Morgan, author of A Nation of Descendants

Table of Contents

Note on the Terminology of Race
Note on Sources

Introduction. Arlington
One. Nansemond
Two. Holy Neck Road
Three. Glenties
Four. Summit Hill
Five. Elwood Station
Six. Richmond
Seven. Salt Lake City
Epilogue. Alexandria

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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