Reunion 006: Sibling Bonds and Lateral Kinship with Amy Harris

In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work. In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.