“All in Some Degree Related to Each Other”: A Demographic and Comparative Resolution of the Anomaly of New England Kinship

Abstract

WHEN J. HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CRIVECOEUR VISITED NANTUCKET in the late 1760s, he noted that people there were genealogically interrelated. The majority of inhabitants were the descendants of the first proprietors, who began the settlement of the town of Sherborn on the island a century earlier. Because of the high density of kin that resulted from the continuity of the population, people typically called each other by such terms as cousin, uncle, or aunt, even though they may not have shared a kinship tie to the person they were addressing. Kinship on Nantucket pervaded community.' Although Crevecoeur is now recognized as the first major exponent of the theme of American distinctiveness, he did not argue that kinship in Nantucket was characteristic of New England or of America. Indeed, his answer to his famous rhetorical question What then is the American, this new man? emphasized the ethnic amalgamation that he perceived in the white population of the demographically heterogeneous middle colonies.2 Certainly, there are plausible reasons for suspecting the concentration of kin on an island off the Massachusetts coast to be unusually large. Water presents a natural barrier to migration, and physical anthropologists have frequently chosen the populations of islands for inquiries into the genetic anomalies associated with inbreeding. The population of neighboring Martha's Vineyard Island, for example, experienced a high incidence of hereditary deafness for over 200 years.3 Was the remarkable kin density on Nantucket another peculiar custom of the islanders, like the pursuit of whales by the menfolk or the morning dose of opium taken daily by the women?4