What's In A Family Name
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 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, tradition, and reputation, one way or another, across time.
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Published in 2026.
Author Q and A
1. What was the question that started this journey?
I wanted to document the story that I had pieced together over the years from my relatives about how I got the extra “t” in my family name.
2. You’ve referred to this book as “More Faulkner than Shakespeare.” What does that mean?
In the book, opposite the contents page, I have some quotes beginning with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The others are from William Faulkner who you will notice added a “u” to his family name. Faulkner's quotations suggest that families and family names can be quite complicated and often in the South become matters of intrigue and even misbehavior.
By the way, my publisher decided that the phrase was too obscure to become a subtitle for the book. She was right. The published subtitle is, "A Southern Family History Becomes a Gothic Mystery".
3. What document became the key to unlocking the larger mystery?
It was a death certificate of the man considered my grandfather – my father’s father.
4. When you’re writing about relatives, where’s the ethical line between truth telling and harm? How did you decide what to include?
I used the same standards I have applied in my other works of history. If there is something embarrassing or controversial about a discovery, I double check the sources to verify the finding. If it poses some type of harm to the living, I give that person a chance to respond to my finding. If it applies to someone who is deceased, I try to talk with their surviving family members, if possible. In this book, I shared the manuscript with my only surviving Suitts cousin and my own children before deciding to publish it. I tried to contact others too without success.
5. What did this investigation teach you about the South that you didn’t understand before?
My findings about my own family brought to light how matters of gender, class, and literacy have shaped in very personal ways the history of the South. In other words, when we get away from studying “the great man of history,” we realize the pivotal role sex, poverty, and illiteracy have played in the lives of ordinary as much as grand families — and in turn the societies those families comprise. They have had a much more powerful influence than traditional treatments of our history reveal.