A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West

by Gerald W. McFarland

Book Overview

This remarkable, innovative book portrays one of the great American experiences in microcosm. Gerald McFarland tells the story of U.S. westward expansion through the stories of his own ancestors--from their arrival in Massachusetts in 1630, through successive generations that moved west, at length reaching the West Coast in 1900. "A Scattered People enriches the literature and reminds readers that most early Americans lived as the Hardemans...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566632978
• ISBN13: 9781566632973
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Compelling reading for anyone with ancestors . . . .

McFarland is a professor of American history at UMass with several volumes on 19th century political history to his credit, but here he turns his attention to a subject much closer to home: The migration of his mother's family from the east coast just after 1800 to the west coast c.1900. The various lines began in western Connecticut and in Rensselaer, New York, and in western Virginia and North Carolina, and they followed the paths trod by many thousands of frontier families (including most of my own lines), along the lower margin of the Great Lakes and down the Ohio River and across the Midwest. One branch of the family finally moved in the 1870s and `80s through Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado into northern California and then to Oregon, while another headed down through Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona into southern California. From the Atlantic to the Pacific in a century -- that is, in large part, the American story. The author is fortunate in that his ancestors were avid correspondents (and, later, photographers) so he is able to combine primary family source material with the contextual secondary sources available to all historical researchers. He also takes the opportunity to weave into this family narrative what he knows about contemporary events in the wider world, so this book is considerably more than "merely" genealogy. He also possesses a smooth and felicitous writing style and I do not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone interested in grass-roots American history or in a broader approach to family history.

My first review

I stumbled across this book in the library. A few pages into it I decided I just had to own it. While reading it I'm saying to myself either, "Yes, that's how it was for my ancestors!" or "Wow, I never considered the role of religion/land grant systems/whatever on the decisions my people made." This book tells how past cultural trends, local conditions, and historical events affected ordinary people and shows clearly that in order to know the people, we have to know the history.This is not the book of an amateur genealogist but of a professional historian -- deeply researched, well reasoned, and skillfully written. A very satisfying book.

Outstanding portrait of America from 1801 to 1901!

I found this book to be fascinating! If you want to see how genealogical research can produce compelling American history, this is the book to read. For example, I grew up in Los Angeles, and had no appreciation for the 1850s' bloody struggle over the extension of slavery into territories before they reached statehood until I read >. I also didn't realize that southern Ohio (largely settled by Virginians who came overland and down the Ohio River) and northern Ohio (largely settled by New Englanders who came west via the Erie Canal and Lake Erie) had such radically different views on slavery. Before I read <<A Scattered People>>, events such as the Compromise of 1850, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry were just bland factoids I had memorized for tests in my high-school American History class. Now I see them as the tips of a huge iceberg that tore into this country's fabric long before the greycoats shelled Fort Sumter, and could well have sunk it. This book puts the disembodied events we studied with little interest and less understanding in our American History textbooks into the context of individual families' lives. These families' struggles, their fateful decisions, their hopes for their children, their successes and their disappointments all leap from every page of this riveting study. American history will never look the same to me after this book.