Rating: 
Summary: Great Read
Review: It takes courage to to do what Edward did. This book was great. It shows all the effort he put into it. The book takes you on the journey with him and the pictures he was able to find were a great treasure indeed. The book is touching to the soul. Great job Edward, You connected some people with treasured information they may never would have had as well as touching your own roots.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating detective story
Review: Edward Ball is a descendant of rice plantation owners. Ball, son of a minister and former Village Voice columnist, set out to discover his connections to a slave-owning past. What he found was six generations of Balls who owned twenty plantations along the Cooper River near Charleston, South Carolina, masters over more than 4,000 African-Americans.
He finds Elias "Red Cap" Ball who inherited half of a 740-acre Comingtee Plantation and twenty black and Indian slaves in 1698. Elias had five white children and possibly two by his black housekeeper, Dolly. One of his children tells his heirs in his will to lend money at interest or buy young slaves. Henry Laurens, married to Red Cap's daughter Eleanor, owned the largest slave-trading firm in the colonies. They brought 7,800 Africans to America between 1751 and 1761, earning a hundred and fifty-six thousand pounds in commissions, making him and his wife one of the richest families in America. John Ball, Red Cap's grandson, leaves $227,191 to his heirs as a result of selling his belongings at auction, which included 367 people.
James Poyas, great-grandson of Red Cap, never married but seems to have had a relationship with a field hand named Diana, with whom he had a son, Frederick. Edward Ball finds Frederick's descendants, living in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Ball also tracks a young slave girl from Sierra Leone to Charleston, where Second Elias Ball bought her, and traces her lineage to Thomas P. Martin, retired assistant school principal and a seventh-generation descendant of Priscilla.
Edward Ball visits Sierra Leone, looking for descendants of slave traders there. Peter Karefa-Smart, a descendant of Gumbo Smart, a middleman for the British, doesn't seem to bothered by what his ancestor did. He says, "If there were no buyers, there would be no sellers, but you could turn it around and say, if there were no sellers, there would have been no buyers."
There are a couple of incidents that caught my interest. One was the story of Boston King, who escaped from Tranquil Hill, one of the Ball plantations. In 1792, Boston King and Twelve hundred other escaped slaves boarded ships bound for Sierra Leone, thus coming full circle. Another is the amazing resemblance between the author, Edmund Ball and his William James Ball, the patriarch of the Ball family during the Civil War. Give William James a haircut and a shave and they could be twins.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: This is one of the most interesting and challenging books I have read in a very long time. Kudos to Mr. Ball for undertaking and executing such an endeavor, and for doing it so well.Edward Ball is a decendant of one of the largest plantation and slave owing families in South Carolina. The book details the arrival of the very first Balls from England and Ireland to the New World and ends with their modern day progeny. In addition to these people's lives he tries to trace the linage of the people they owned as slaves to their their modern day decendants meeting cousins and other family relations along the way. Tracing the slaves' relatives is more difficult since theirs is more of an oral than a written history, but with the meager details he had to go on, Mr.Ball has done a wonderful job. More than just filling out a family tree (of which there are several highly detailed ones in the back of the book) this book gives insights into the slave trade, daily plantation life and life after Reconstruction. The amount of research that had to have gone into this work is awesome. There are hundreds of dates, names and places which other reviewers have mentioned as being tedious or hard to follow. Considering the sheer numbers of people and the great expanse of time he dealt with, I do not think it could have been done any better. This book is a wealth of information; anyone who picks it up could benefit from the information found in its pages. While a bit lengthy, Slaves in the Family would make great companion reading for an American History class. I look forward to reading Mr. Ball's newest work and hope that at some point in the future he traces back his mother's family history as they too were plantation owners.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting - but
Review: I found this book to be quit interesting in it's coverage of slavery in America from 1500-1865. It brought forth many things about people (both black and white) in America's early years that we often don't think about. The only problem with the book is the author is trying to find someone to blame slavery in America on and does not seem to understand that the practice has been going on for centuries and still goes on today. But all in all it is a book worth the time to read!
Rating:
Summary: Easily followed history
Review: I enjoyed this book a lot. It took me a little longer than usual
to read this book (it is a lengthy book). I blame it on the holiday season and my work load. If you are a busy person, it might take you some time to read as well, plus you find yourself flipping back and forth to the pictures to place a face with the names mentioned. Edward Ball did a good job in researching his family history and piecing together the slave's family tree as well. I liked the fact that he did not show any bias in his writing. He could have taken the oral history of the Ball family as fact, but he decided to collaborate his findings with the former slaves families. In doing so, he found out that many slaves where actually blood relatives of his. I didn't buy this book (I borrowed it from the library), however after reading it, I will purchase it, because if I ever plan to research my family history it will help me to organize my findings. I also plan to buy his second book "Sweet Hell Inside."
Rating:
Summary: Interesting history
Review: I found this book to be very interesting reading, well documented, and an unigue approach to slavery. The author's goal is to discover the truth about what happened to his families slaves and their descendants. To take an honest look at your family's past requires, I believe, real guts. I learned about slavery & the south.
Rating: 
Summary: High Expectations
Review: I think Edward Ball's unimaginative style and presentation of the information boring and difficult to read. Slow moving and unorganized, many times I fought sleep while trying to read this book. No, I wasn't tired. It's summer and I am a student getting atleast ten hours a night. Before you ask- yes, I am interested in early colonial America, slave trade, slavery, and the civil war. I came into this book with great expectations. I expected to love it and to rave about it. Ten pages into the work, I found my thoughts filling with dread. This was not at all the good quality of historical non-fiction I have become accustomed to. Ball has a very weak voice throughout the work, and it visibly suffers due to that shortcoming. Depending on the situation, he can be arrogant, rebellious, apologetic, defensive, or 'touched' to the point of 'tears'. His actions constantly contradict other actions or things he says. A shallow air and a fake, amde to suit the moment personality makes it impossible to get a real picture for who our narrator is. I would hesitate before recommending this work to anyone I valued in my life. Sure, the factualy content and informantion is great, but the disorganization and lack of clarity that pervades the book's 445 pages almost totally cancels out the intrest you could have in the information. Aside from the fact that I could not locate a personality to relate to, Ball's actions enraged me several times, seeming unjustified and silly. The one good thing I will say about this book is that it brought up a previously untouchable matter. Ball journeys back ti Sierra Leone, a country Ball slaves were shipped from, and poses a question to the Africans about their responsibility in the Slave trade. A woman by the name of Lenga-Kroma gives a powerful answer ending with, "But what can I do now? What you do with the present is what really matters." The Africans seem to take the same approach Southern Americans do. 'We're sorry it happened. It was bad. But we gotta move on.' Move on we shall, and hopefully we can move away from things like this book.
Rating: 
Summary: "Slaves" - Intriguing History Lesson Loses Steam In End
Review: In "Slaves In The Family," Edward Ball take readers on a fascinating and exhaustive(and sometimes exhausting) look into his family's past as slave owners in South Carolina. The author delves back eight generations as his ancestors cross the Atlantic and make their claim in America near Charleston. As the title suggests, Ball explores the lives of the slaves on the family's many plantations. This is where the book is at its most interesting. Ball not only gives us historical accounts but also meets with descendants in the present day. Their reactions, sometimes positive other times wary (especially where there is evidence of an owner-slave offspring), is very good reading. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there is not enough of that type of material in the later stages of the book. At one stretch, the emphasis seems to exclusively shift to the extensive lineage of the Ball family. Despite the genealogy chart included in the book, I found it nearly impossible to keep track of everyone. Likewise, the author's impartiality towards his family seemed to shift and in many instances Ball seemed to be on a mission to prove that the family's slaves were well treated. The book also ends on an odd note as the author travels to Africa to visit one of the sites where slaves were forced to leave their native land. There he tracks down the African descendants of those who sold slaves and asks them to atone for their ancestors' past sins as well. While the logic of the slave seller being as guilty as the slave buyer has a good deal of validity, it just comes off as the author trying to alleviate his own burdens. I did see Ball on a talk show several years ago and he did not come off this way, so perhaps the written word is simply more open for interpretation. Nevertheless, I would recommend "Slaves" to anyone interested in geneology, early American (especially Southern) history, and/or the slave experience. Addtionally, with my interpretation as compared to others, the book is open for some good discussion/debate. There is something to be learned through out the book - but ultimately I think think that the parts are greater than the whole.
Rating:
Summary: Thank you Ed Ball
Review: This is one of the best books I have ever read. I now have a much clearer picture of life in the American south from before the Revolutionary thru the Civil War and beyond. I found Mr. Ball to be very honest and forthright in his work, and very emotional subjects he handled with efficiency,understanding and compassion. I appreciate him so much for this undertaking. The ending really tripped me out. How wonderful that he went all the way to Africa to interview some decendants of the orginal African slave traders. He did a wonderful job of letting me know how the slave owner's felt about their chosen occupation. The informtion that had the greatest impression on me was that a very high precentage of people imported in chains from African were indeed CHILREN. So it is quite possible that my first ancestor in this country was an eight or nine year old child. What a tragedy. What a Halocaust. Please forgive me for feeling sad for a minute. Another fact that impressed me was that entire slave families most often lived in one room of approximately 10 x 10. I can't imagine working a 14 or 15 hour day and then returning a small room that I had to share with perhaps up to 5 or 6 other people. May God Bless my ancestors for enduring the hardships of American slavery so that I am here today to enjoy what they were unable to enjoy. May God Bless Mr. Ball for his work.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read!
Review: Had I not been reading an article in the Toronto Star, I never would have known about this book. How interesting that a Canadian journalist put this book on her "must-read" list. I had to check it out and I'm so glad I did. This is one of the best books I've read! Like Kentucky, I could not put this book down. Ball has written not only his family's story, but he's written an interesting history of early colonial America up to the Civil War. I found it fascinating how his ancestors kept detailed records of just about everything, including the slaves that they had owned. And his ability to construct from these annals an account of daily life on a plantation was interesting. Too bad history, when taught in school, is not half as interesting as this book. Thank you, Mr. Ball for sharing your ancestral history with us all!
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