Reunion 006: Sibling Bonds and Lateral Kinship with Amy Harris
In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work.
In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.
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TODAY'S GUEST
Ula Yvette Taylor is a professor in the Department of African American Studies. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities.
Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award. She earned her doctorate in American History from UC Santa Barbara.
SHOW NOTES
- TODAY'S GUEST
Amy Harris’s research focuses on families, women, and gender in eighteenth-century Britain. She has also written on family and genealogy in the Latter-day Saint context. She is an Accredited Genealogist and currently serves as the Family History Program Coordinator at Brigham Young University.
Her first book, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester, 2012) used both historical and genealogical methods to explore sibling relationships and their connections to political and social ideas of equality. Her most recent work, Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford, 2023) uncovers family dynamics beyond couplehood and parenthood to reveal how unmarried or childless people shaped family life, childrearing, and genealogical practices in the eighteenth century. Her contribution to the Neal A Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship’s series, Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants, Redeeming the Dead, appeared in late 2024.
Dr. Harris has completed fellowships at the Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Library and the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2024, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Prof. Harris teaches European and British history, introductory genealogical methods, English paleography, and advanced British genealogical methodology courses. She also posts about family history and genealogy on Instagram @familyhistoryprof.
SHOW NOTES
- Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering (Eerdmans, 2013).
- Amy Harris, "Overflowing with Family," Wayfare Magazine, May 1, 2024
- Amy Harris, "Of Dead Cats and Dead People: How Family History Can Save the World," BYU Speeches, July 18, 2017.
- C. Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1733-1833 (Omohundro Institute and Universoty of North Carolina Press, 2018).
- Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2012).
- Naomi Simmons, Tamzin Thompson, and Jenny Quintana, "Family and Friends" (Online Course)
