Cursory Family Sketches.

Sarah Ann Tompkins Garnett.

Cursory Family Sketches.

Albany:

Joel Munsell,

1870. 

Zoe’s cousin Sarah Garnett wrote about their ancestors in colonial Virginia and Kentucky—George Washington was another cousin—who assembled large libraries, read voraciously, and were brilliant conversationalists and musicians. For male and female relatives, Sarah Garnett wrote, the pursuit of knowledge “sometimes destroyed the influence and powers of ambition.” That unworldliness—which Zoe inherited—was only made possible before the Civil War by the labors of enslaved Black people. Postcard: the hamlet where Zoe lived around 1870, south of Fredericksburg, VA, near Stonewall Jackson’s deathplace. 

From the Collection of Eve M. Kahn.