Reading about Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race oldest daughter of Strom Thurmond who he never publicly recognized in his 100-year life. I noticed that she tried unsuccessfully to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy through her father’s descent from Confederate soldiers, but emphasized the need for African-Americans to join more lineage-based fraternal societies in order to forge closer ties to the earlier United States. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has also joined the Sons of the American Revolution by way of a free man of color who fought for Continental forces in the Revolutionary War.

This led me to the list of lineage-based fraternal societies in the United States, most of which are either based on participation in war, settlement of a state or region at a particular time, ethnicity, service in some military branch.

Most of these tend to be of the accidental, circumstantial type that would involve some catechism of honor to esteem the “honorable ancestors”, the sort of unchangeable accident of history involving some distant soldier guy (or nurse woman) who, if you were not reminded of it or cognizant of research, you would totally forget or ignore. Similar to this practice is the war or period reenactment culture (like RenFaire and Civil War reenactment).

The only African-American-oriented genealogical [NOT lineage] society which I can find right now is the AAHGS-Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc. and their state chapters, which exist to “share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research” and “to trace the historical ties that bind us one to another, mold the present, and shape the future.”

So it’s not exactly “Sons/Daughters of [whatever]”.

It seems to predominantly be a Euro-American thing. It’s hard for us to squeeze into most of these organizations.