In what began as a simple genealogical search for the origins of the extra "t" in his surname, Steve Suitts pieces together a crazy quilt of revelations and documents for a family story no relative dared to remember and no overly proud family would want to publish.

In the "Free State of Winston," a rural, Deep South county once opposed to the Civil War and the Confederacy, Suitts situates his ancestry as a southern story of common white folk, largely illiterate, struggling in isolated communities to survive and strive. It is a man's world where class distinctions create new norms, but strong-willed women determine families' trajectory, traditions, and reputation, one way or another, across time.

Suitts's true-to-life chronicle is as unsparing as southern fiction in revealing how ambitions, desires, lies, sex, and infidelity mold his family and leaders of his hardscrabble community. In an introduction, Suitts remembers his own childhood, reckoning with how his family's discovered past helps explain his alcoholic father and their troubled relationship.

The book concludes by returning to the Civil War, where his great-great grandfather's open stance as a Union man left him afterwards as a scorned and forgotten scalawag who with his wife decides to protect their son in a way that surely inspired how Suitts came by his oddly spelled last name. In excavating a forgotten people and place amid one of many souths below the Mason-Dixon line, the book also provides a readable, instructive journey into the current ways of genealogy.