"After the death of my mother made me an orphan in my fifties--my father had died twenty-four years earlier--I developed a sudden interest in genealogy that was close to an obsession. I realized, fairly quickly, that this obsession was probably a certain form of bereavement, but that did not lessen its intensity. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the feeling that my mother's life and the immediate past of my whole extended family was in danger of being lost forever, as the far past was already lost. I was perhaps the first person in my lineage, a lineage that was undoubtedly ancient--as ancient as everyone else who is alive today--with the opportunity to discover whatever past was there, and I felt I had to make a stand about it. In spite of all the usual distractions, I was simply going to do it. I felt it as an important responsibility.

I was not interested in genealogy in order to prove that I was somebody, the legitimate heir to the English throne perhaps, or a descendant of the Pilgrims. The fact is I had come from a rather large extended family, and now--with the death of my mother--most of them were gone. I remembered them all vividly, mostly with affection, but no doubt I was feeling lonely. I had had children of my own, but they were out of the nest starting their own families now, living far away. I wanted to reclaim the sense of having a family once again.

Who were we anyway? We were, I supposed an ordinary middle class family from the American Midwest, a family of white people, vaguely English (or Irish, I thought) with a little bit of German and Swiss from my mother's side. Basically standard whitebread Americans, just plain folks, people somehow without ethnicity or real history, yet people who had been lucky and privileged enough that, in the latter part of the twentieth century, we had been taught to feel a little bit guilty about being so white and so bland, so lacking in any specific cultural identity, as if we had reached whatever middling level of economic security we had attained through almost no effort at all, simply because we were white and ordinary.

In a tangible sense, I didn't know who we were. I felt we needed to identify ourselves more clearly and fully, find out where we came from, how we came to be living in the places we called home, and pass that information on to future generations of descendants. This information was perishable, after all--some of it had surely perished already. It would be ignorant and careless of me not to do what I could to find out what was left and make it permanent, if possible--put it on a CD or bury it somewhere deep in the bowels of the Library of Congress--so that it might survive. Of course, I wouldn't have minded if my ancestors all turned out to be decent and accomplished. But if there were horse thieves or worse, I wanted to know that too. I was determined to be ruthless--I wanted to know the truth, even if it might be unpleasant."

Thus begins Joe David Bellamy's new book, Kindred Spirits, a book about family and relationships and the amazing deep ancestral history of those same people (his family) that no one ever knew before with such sweep, detail, and comprehensive clarity until now. Bellamy's genealogical odyssey will be a revelation to anyone interested in his or her own family history and to anyone who has ever wondered what it means to be an American.