I was recently reading Baker's A Storm of Witchcraft and in the latter half he says something along the lines of "Historians often ignore genealogy, treating it as the realm of antiquarians and octogenarians."

And I think he's really onto something here. Histories of New England from settlement to about the American Revolution often emphasize the complex social network that is the Atlantic World, but post 1775 those connections tend to be completely ignored.

Yet why should we think that a political disunion should destroy generations old family and trade connections? We know family meant something, and we know that the mercantile world was reliant on family connections through marriage and resettlement of sons to benefit family networks. And we know American merchants were still trading within the British Atlantic throughout the War, and that Loyalists returned to the former colonies to regain their property.

Anyways, applied to my own research, looking within 2 or 3 generations of the names that came up while conducting my current research has uncovered something unexpected - a number of wealthy New Englanders who either had owned or inherited Caribbean plantations.

And with that, one unique instance is an Antiguan woman joining her brother's family near Boston in 1830 with a "former slave". Which becomes troublesome because in 1835 she receives compensation from the British government for a single slave emancipated by the Abolition Act of 1833.

So in that vein, perhaps we should be considering genealogy and family connections being as valuable as they obviously were to our subject matter.

Well Im a first time participant, so hopefully Im not being too brazen by opening the discussion, but here's one of my favorites. Mercy Otis Warren published the first history of the american revolution in 1805, just over 2 decades after the Treaty of Paris, and even then, her writings were met with both praise and opposition. Thomas Jefferson praised the works extensively as a "truthful account", where John Adams thought it such a piece of propaganda (especially against himself), that it led to the end of a decades long friendship with Mercy Otis Warren. How and in what ways can/has an initial historic account that becomes widely received shape views of the events for future generations, in particular those of the American revolution. When did historians began to take account for the authors of historic events' intentions, ambitions, and personal grievances into there interpretation of these accounts?