HOLLYWOOD, Md. – Historic Sotterley is proud to announce the launch of The Kane Family: Slavery to Freedom at Sotterley, a collection of writings by genealogist, researcher, and historian Agnes Kane Callum, compiled and edited by author Dave G. Brown.
The book aims to preserve Agnes’s writing and knowledge about her family’s history, which sparked an era of evolution at Historic Sotterley that fundamentally changed the way the organization connects to and tells the stories of its past.
A passionate student and researcher, Agnes Kane Callum’s dedication to and love of history brought her to unfold her family’s genealogy and their connection to Sotterley Plantation through her paternal grandfather, Henry Kane, who was born a slave at Sotterley.
She became instrumental in uncovering not only her family’s history, but the family histories of what would become hundreds of descendants of those who had lived at labored at Sotterley, now living all around the globe. Her work was published in several books, pamphlets, and volumes of research, which are not commercially available.
In The Kane Family: Slavery to Freedom at Sotterley, Dave G. Brown brings together Agnes’s research about her family, in its original wording, with added context, commentary, and findings from after her passing. It is both an effort to preserve her important work and a memorial to Agnes and her legacy. It includes two forewords from her descendants: her daughter, Agnes Lightfoot, and her cousin and current President of Historic Sotterley’s Board of Trustees, Gwendoline Bankins.
“My purpose for this book is to preserve the one family story that has been documented about the lives of enslaved people at Sotterley,” said Brown. “Given the passage of time and the difficulty of documenting slave family histories, it seems unlikely that the story of another of the dozen enslaved families at Sotterley will be researched as Agnes Kane Callum did her family. So, preserving the Kane family story is important.”
Dave G. Brown served on Historic Sotterley’s Board of Trustees for a decade, and in his time connected to the organization has authored numerous books about the site and its history, including Sotterley: Her People and Their Worlds, George Plater of Sotterley, and The Barber Family: From Slavery, Through Segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. He has been a dedicated interpreter of Sotterley’s history, and a champion for researching, preserving, and documenting the stories of its people.
The Kane Family: Slavery to Freedom at Sotterley is for sale exclusively at Historic Sotterley. It can be purchased in person for $20.00, or shipped for a fee by emailing officemanager@sotterley.org