Ancestors: A Family History

Novelist and long-time New Yorker editor William Maxwell’s family memoir tells of his childhood and his family’s long connection to Lincoln, Illinois. Maxwell and my small town Illinois-born grandmother were contemporaries, so the setting interested me. Several generations of Maxwell’s family belonged to the religious movement now known as the Stone-Campbell Movement, which includes the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Churches of Christ, and independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. Maxwell digs deep into the history of the Stone-Campbell Movement in order to understand his family and the way that their faith shaped them.

Maxwell’s memoir wouldn’t pass muster as an example of genealogical methodology since show more it’s undocumented. However, this doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be useful to genealogists and family historians. Maxwell views his ancestors through the lens of a fiction writer and gets to the heart of the personalities, motivations, and individual decisions that make up his family story. Many families with Midwestern roots likely had at least one branch that belonged to the Stone-Campbell Movement. Maxwell’s memoir offers a good starting point for readers with an interest in this movement since he includes references to several standard histories. Maxwell references Haynes’s History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois, 1819-1914, which I’ve consulted for my own family history research. show less

ANCESTORS is William Maxwell's deep dive into his own family history. I have read at least a half dozen Maxwell books, all of them compelling, deeply moving, and rendered in his trademark elegant style. This one was a bit dry, especially the first third or so, as he detailed the far-removed "great-greats" and even further back - all that genealogy - but got a lot more interesting when he reached deeply into the lives of his own grandparents and parents and their Illinois roots. His own mother died when he was just seven, a loss which affected, perhaps even scarred, him deeply, and was reflected in many of his stories and novels. There are a number of fascinating skeletons in the Maxwell and Blinn family closets, making for some very show more good reading. I've had this on my shelf for a good ten years, so I'm glad I finally read it. Recommended for all who love Maxwell's work.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen, his father, an insurance executive, moved the family to Chicago. My grandfather James Lyle McCormick was born in the same county of Illinois in 1898. Like Maxwell, his mother also died when he was young, and his father, also an insurance executive, also moved the family to Chicago, where James went to high school in the Austin neighborhood and attended the University of Chicago after serving in WWI. Maxwell's family attended the Christian Church as did the family of McCormick's mother, the Housers. Maxwell is a talented writer and gives an account of his ancestry which closely parallels my own. Particularly, he gives detailed accounts of the formation of the show more Christian Church by Barton Stone which took place near the same place in Kentucky where parts of our family lived.

I'm sure his ancestors and mine knew each other. The writing is beautiful and the feeling of the history is very similar to my own fantasy of how I would like to write a history of our family. show less