"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 would mean to meet one's ancestors. Scientific advances such as DNA testing and recent opportunities via internet research have given genealogy and family history new credibility that has made it the second most popular subject area on the internet after pornography--and an obsession with baby boomers.

Available Now! Book trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFS44dkifuo

"It's easy to understand the temptations of genealogy, the apparent promise of being able to locate oneself in space and time, acquiring, if one is lucky, a bona fide sliver of something like divine perspective. What's remarkable about Kindred Spirits is Joe David Bellamy's ability to make a private quest into a work of fascination and suspense for his readers."
--Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Bestselling author

"Kindred Spirits is a wise, wild ride, written with wit and energy and charm, and packed with stories that read like fiction. By the last page you'll have read a surprising history of America, and you'll have a new notion of just how eerily connected we all are."
--Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth

“I really enjoyed this book! Joe David Bellamy’s Kindred Spirits is so engaging, charmingly inclusive, and skillfully and tenderly spooned out, there is real comfort here in the universal message that many of us may quite possibly be at least cousins.
An exceptional and compelling new breed of memoir, history lesson, genealogy tutorial, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, personal meditation, and fireside seat-gripper, Kindred Spirits is rich with stunners and head-spinners that both entertain and leave the reader pondering the nature of chance and destiny that inform all of our origin tales. It will be hard to read this and not decide you are related to Joe David Bellamy.”
—Steve Amick, author of The Lake, the River & the Other Lake and Nothing But a Smile