The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth
Written by Karen Branan
Narrated by Pam Ward
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. For Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of that sheriff, this isn't just history; this is family history.
Branan spent nearly twenty years combing through diaries and letters, hunting for clues in libraries and archives throughout the United States to piece together the events and motives that led a group of people to murder four of their fellow citizens in such a brutal public display. Her research revealed surprising new insights into the day-to-day reality of race relations in the Jim Crow-era South, but what she ultimately discovered was far more personal.
A gripping story of privilege and power, anger, and atonement, The Family Tree transports listeners to a small Southern town steeped in racial tension and bound by powerful family ties. Branan takes us back in time to the Civil War, demonstrating how plantation politics and the Lost Cause movement set the stage for the fiery racial dynamics of the twentieth century.
Karen Branan
Karen Branan is a veteran journalist who has written for newspapers, magazines, the stage, and television for almost fifty years. Her work has appeared in Life, Mother Jones, Ms., Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and on various television networks. Branan is affiliated with Coming to the Table, an organization founded by the black and white descendants of Thomas Jefferson. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia and now lives in Washington, DC.
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Reviews for The Family Tree
17 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Karen Branan relates the story of her family sparked by her discovery of a lynching in Hamilton, Georgia, her ancestral town. She found herself related to one of those hanged because of an ancestor's second family with a black woman. While it is obvious the author researched the story well, the story seemed to drag a little too much in places. In places she seems to include abstract information that could not come from an interviewed source and did not come from the cited account. It is an interesting read that shows a dark side of Southern history. I appreciated the author's family chart in the front of the book which helped place individuals. I detest the blind endnotes used in this book. Please give me footnotes or at least numbered endnotes so one is aware of their existence!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Journalist Karen Branan has deep roots in Harris County, Georgia. Everything she thought she knew about her family and the history of her community was upended when she learned of a 1912 lynching of three black men and a black woman. Not only was she related to some of the mob, she also learned that she was related to some of the victims. (Another of her discoveries was that many of the white community leaders of Harris County had a second black family, including some of her relatives.)This is an important topic, and I had a high interest in reading the book. However, I had a hard time following the narrative. The book could have used a family tree diagram, a list of characters, or both. It was difficult for me to remember who was who, especially between reading sessions. It might have helped if Branan had consistently described people in terms of how they are related to her instead of (or maybe in addition to) how they are related to each other. The narrative might flow better if some of the details were provided in footnotes instead of in the main text.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a memoir and history of life and death in Harris county, Georgia, mostly from 1900-1990s. Its a worthwhile read, if a bit unsettling and unnecessarily difficult. For a "factual" book, it contains an awful lot of assertions about the motives and thoughts of historical people which I doubt the author has any documentation for. There are a lot of unsupported statements such as "The YMCA, built to keep blacks in their place...". This is a surprising statement to most people, which I doubt there is any documentation for. Yet the author just puts these statements out there baldly without further comment. In my opinion, this lack of rigor detracts from the impact of the research the author has done on an important subject.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A developmental editor could've organized these masses of information into a useful structure. I think the author got carried away with all the research she did - tried to include too much, about too many people; switched back and forth in time too often; it was never very clear why I was supposed to care about every atrocity that she'd found.She could have written a book about the lynching, and minimized her memoir parts. She could have written a memoir about how she felt about horrendous family secrets. But combining the two approaches, she ended up with kind of a mess.