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

From North Ayrshire, Scotland, to Northern Ireland to various locations throughout North America, a middle-class family named Hammill is documented with stringent attention to detail by Matthews, founder of Chicago Review Press and a Hammill family descendant. Weaving historical prose with mawkish (though clearly set-off) sections of “fictions of my own devising,” Matthews attempts to illustrate a multigenerational drama in order to convey the history of ordinary people. The best documented family history begins with John Hammill, who left Northern Ireland for Maryland colony in 1725, yet even here the author occasionally injects a personal note (“I hope that Lucretia rose above her housewife's dismay”). Matthews is at her best relating major events that draw on primary sources, such as the transcript of the post–Civil War trial of Virginian Hugh Hammill, charged with providing a boat to the Confederates, or the trek west made by William and Lucretia Hammill in the 1880s. Matthews succeeds in showing that “the Hammill family passed along its preferences” through several generations, yet fails to validate her dubious claim that “if more people... retrieved and told their family stories to see what they reveal—well, this would be a better world....” Illus., maps. (Nov.)