Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family

Historians and biographers have traditionally favored stories of the powerful and the trends they set in motion. More recently, they've spotlighted the neglected lives of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. "But," asks Linda H. Matthews, descendant of the pragmatic, adaptable, and lively Hammill family, "who tells the stories of the people in the middle?"

Spanning three centuries and three seas, from the bluffs of Scotland and Ireland to colonial Chesapeake Bay and Virginia, then across th...