When I saw this book available from NetGalley I absolutely had to read it. Genealogy, research, seeing national history through family history - entirely up my alley. And I was not disappointed.
Ginzberg follows the story of the children of Charleston SC enslaver Richard Cogdell and a young enslaved woman he bought when she was fifteen. Over the remaining 20 years of her life they had nine children. That in itself is not an unusual story in the American south. What is unusual is what else happened.

Cogdell was in his 40s and married with children when he bought Sarah Martha Sanders. Within a couple of years, his wife had departed, without her children, from the home they shared, and set up her own residence, where she died not too long afterward. Cogdell remained in his home and continued having children with Sarah. She died in 1855, leaving him with several surviving children of hers. Not long afterward, he abandoned Charleston and went with those children to Philadelphia, where he bought a house and transferred ownership to them, and took up residence at a hotel nearby. He never returned to Charleston until he was buried there.

Those children thrived as best they could in an antislavery, but also racist, city, becoming teachers and tradespeople, and remained intensely loyal not only to one another but to their white father (who had also been their owner). They also had a strength of self-confidence that makes the reader (and the author as well) wonder about the personality and character of the mother that they would have known and remembered quite well.

The reason this story has become known is that someone preserved an archive of letters, documents, and photographs in the Sanders family, giving lots of insight into who these people were, but leaving frustrating gaps as well.

What Ginzberg is unable to find out, among many other things, is why this move was undertaken. South Carolina had made it illegal for enslavers to free those they enslaved (Ginzberg tartly points out that this shows they were more afraid of a growing population of free black people than they were about restricting owners' property rights) - so as he aged it would have been clear both to him and to them that they would be sold to settle his estate. Who proposed and pushed the Philadelphia solution? Unknown. What was Sarah Martha Sanders like, and where did she come from before Cogdell bought her? Unknown. Cogdell's white Stevens ancestry is known and explored, but it is not possible to know Sanders'. One or two poignant letters from Cogdell to Sanders remain in the archive, hinting at but not at all clarifying the nature of their relationship, which, it cannot be denied, began on a basis of raw power of enslaver over enslaved.

At times, my head spun because of the repetition of names - the family honored their forebears over and over in the names of their children, and the white side of the family seemed to be similarly repetitive.

Toward the end of the book, Ginzberg delves into the understanding, if any, of this story among the 20th century white descendants of the Stevens family, and finds that essentially there was none. In the mid 20th century a descendant of a cousin of Cogdell's wrote lots of articles and essays supporting an honorable view of the confederacy and the south, and indicated that he believed the Stevens family line ended with him; he clearly didn't know about the children of Sarah Martha Sanders. When some of this information was posted online, someone on a genealogy site commented that Cogdell must have married a widow named Sanders who had children.

Along the way, Ginzberg inserts paragraphs laying out the questions and guesses that the evidence raises in her mind, but that she cannot answer. She tells this complex story artfully, with respect for the personal agency and identity of everyone involved. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a more complete and nuanced understanding of American history than is popular today.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an advance galley of this book.

Tangled Journeys could be described as a microhistory of generations of a family. The problem with that description is that it only captures one of the major themes of the book. Ginzberg uses the history not just to look at changes over time, but also a tangled journey into the nature of history. Throughout her writing, she carefully weaves an investigation into how history is created. She takes time to explore the nature of the sources she uses, explaining their strengths and where they fall short. The book ultimately is just as much a meditation of truth in history and the epistemological challenges that come with investigating a past that we cannot go back and experience. Ginzberg's work is honest inquiry. She shares questions she is confused about or when the record does not provide adequate answers. Readers can appreciate the sources, maps, and photos so that readers can also analyze them as they read.There are traces of Sarah Martha Sanders' life, fragment in which Ginzberg is able to piece together a narrative that is adequate in her view, but ultimately incomplete. Ginzberg, while not directly saying it, seems to imply several places that history itself is always incomplete, that we must piece together what we can and be comfortable with the holes and unanswered questions we might have. At one point she refers the understanding of Sanders as a ghost, there, but perhaps fully unreachable. In some respect, the book felt similar to McLaurin's Celia, A Slave.

The background she provides of Sanders' enslaver shows how one's life can be understood but not completely. There are several places where the history and record are unclear. Ginzberg sets the story and context of the live sin her book around Charleston, describing the town's importance to enslavement and those who have interactions with the institution. Her writing provides great insight into social structures and life in middle class. Class status simmers throughout the work, as much as the detective work Ginzberg tries to complete.

In all, Ginzberg's work may be best described as "humble history." One in which perhaps more historians could follow.