Kith And Kin is a social history of a Southern family from the time the first family member arrived in America with Winthrop’s fleet in 1630 until one of the family units lived in Macon, Georgia. The history is woven around and through information from primary documents, testimony which forms the pattern and fabric of the book. The documents include diaries, memoirs, plantation journals, letters, business papers, and church, academy, and court records. The book depicts the drama and texture of the lives of the people in the family, and the impact of historical events on their lives, as well as the influence of their lives on the society in which they lived. Diverse characters emerge as the family story unfolds: Richard Furman, about whom, during the American Revolution, Lord Cornwallis declared, “I fear the prayers of that godly youth more than the armies of Sumter and Marion.” John Barnwell, who, when fighting in the Indian wars, exclaimed, “May South Carolina prosper while I bleed and suffer!” Benjamin Lawton Willingham, who guided his family in the transition from a pre-Civil War South Carolina plantation and enabled them to become “useful members of society” in postwar Macon, Georgia. There are many other who contribute to the fabric and texture of the story. In the end there are May Nottingham, Furman Lawton, and their children, who “with proud mind and empty purse” brought their family through the depression years of the 1930s. The book pictures as era that ends in the 1930s, but the history of the family does not end with the Great Depression. The saga is continuing, as “indelible and timeless as the story of American itself, of which every family is a quickening microcosm.” Carolyn L. Harrell, a retired publications engineer, lives in Huntsville, Alabama.