Book Review: Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History

Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History. By Lori D. Ginzberg. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2024. Softcover, 288 pp. $29.95. 

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

If the archival record of America’s past tells us anything, it is that we have a complicated history. Old and new records continue to inform us, intrigue us, and in some cases infuriate, while in others, inspire us. As much as we sometimes may want to make our history crystal clear or cut and dried, historians’ continual reappraisal and discovery of documentary evidence adds to our understanding of the past and shows us that American history is complex and nuanced. Lori D. Ginzberg’s recently published book, Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History, serves as an excellent example.

Using a family’s collection of documents as the book’s foundation—some of which have amazingly survived for centuries—Ginzberg takes readers on a winding road of discovery through America’s challenges with race and its ideals of liberty and equality, while painstakingly linking generation to generation.

Residing in the Library Company of Philadelphia’s holdings is the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning-Chew Collection. It is a rather unusual collection of documents that date back to before the American Revolution. The records begin with John Stevens, a white Englishman who left his mother country for opportunities on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in the 1750s. Subsequent moves took him to Georgia, and then finally to Charleston, South Carolina. Fortunately, his descendants kept his documents, as well as those from subsequent generations. They give amazing insight into his family’s life and their worlds.

John Stevens’ daughter, Mary Ann Elizabeth, married George Cogdell. Their union produced three sons. One son, Richard Walpole Cogdell, was born in 1787. Richard Cogdell married and fathered five children with a white wife. He became an active member of Charleston’s business and social community, as well as a slaveholder. Before Richard’s wife died in 1832, he purchased an enslaved girl named Sarah Martha Sanders. Richard impregnated the teenaged Sarah in the summer of 1831 and she gave birth to the first of their nine children together.

Using the documents in the collection, along with a plethora of other outside sources, Ginzberg’s detective work is admirable. Yet, in places, where the records do not speak as specifically as we might wish they would—for example in the case of Sarah Martha Sanders herself—some inferences are required. In the book’s introduction Ginzberg explains: “When I cannot fill these gaps with facts, I suggest some possibilities the silences themselves offer. Readers who dislike or distrust the word ‘perhaps’ will take issue with this, but this book invites people to explore how historians travel through the past and to interrogate what we feel able to say about it.” (4)

Sarah Martha Sanders died in 1850. As clouds of civil war built up during the 1850s, 70-year-old Richard Cogdell, the well off and well-respected Charlestonian, pulled up stakes and moved his mixed race Sanders family to Philadelphia in 1857. The children, ranging from about 25 to 9, received a new start in life in a free state. Cogdell purchased a home for them while he lived nearby separately, however, he was a common visitor in his children’s home before he died in 1866. In Philadelphia, the Sanders teenage and younger children received an education and became part of the Philadelphia’s African American middle class.

Ginzberg’s coverage of the Civil War years and Reconstruction is particularly interesting. While Cogdell moved to a free state and supported his mixed-race children in their endeavors to advance their individual and collective lives, he seems to have retained sentiments for his old home state and their cause. The also war strained Cogdell’s ability to financially support himself and his mixed-race family in their new location. One of Cogdell’s daughters, Julia, married a Black man named Edward Venning, who ended up drafted. Venning chose to pay a substitute who went in his place, served in the 6^th United States Colored Infantry, and eventually died from disease in January 1864. Ginzburg carries the family’s many fascinating stories of struggles and achievement on into the mid-20^th century.

Ginzberg divides the book into seven chapters that are bookended with an introduction and conclusion. A welcome family tree included at the front of the book helps keep the various family members, generations, and family lines from becoming too confusing. In addition, a number of images of documents, photographs of family members, and maps all aid readers’ understanding. Thorough endnote and bibliography sections demonstrate the width and depth of Ginzberg’s research and her impressive detective work.

Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History is unique in the sense that the extant and supporting documents allow this particular family’s story to be told more thoroughly that most others in similar circumstances. However, in other ways, such as its 19^th century mixed-race composition, its complex nature is one that is not as uncommon as one may think. Readers will find Tangled Journeys a rich, well-told history that has as many unexpected turns as its title implies.