"Beginning with the Kennans' life of unmitigated poverty in Scotland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, An American Family details the Kennan family's passage to America and the hardships they faced as early settlers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kennan captures life in colonial times and in the period following the Revolutionary War, and chronicles the major events of a nation's early history with the rare intimacy of a family member reflecting on his forebears."--BOOK JACKET.