Those Southern Lamars

Growing up in New England, I heard stories from my Maryland born mother about life that went on before the Civil War. She had been born in the early 1900's and heard these stories from old aunts who had been born around 1840 and were then in their 70's.
Hearing these once distilled stories, I became interested in learning as much as I could about the real life stories of this big old family, or as she called it "a big old Southern family".