My People

My People: The Story of a Virginia Family presents the history of Barbara Newman's American ancestors -- from the earliest colonists who came to Richmond, Charlottesville, and the Shenandoah Valley more than three hundred years ago, to their descendants who fought, suffered, and died for the Confederacy in the nineteenth century. Her twentieth-century grandparents and parents prospered in the Roaring Twenties, endured the calamity of the Great Depression, then gave their all to the Second World War and the Korean Conflict.

Newman also brings to life the African-Americans, first under slavery and then under Jim Crow segregation, who worked for her ancestors. Slave-owning planters and poor white farmers, enslaved and free black people, soldiers, lawyers, clerks, teachers, seamstresses, and housewives -- all their stories are included in this rich history of Newman's Virginia ancestors.