Exploring encounters between families, their histories and archived oral histories

Abstract

As family historians are a key user group for so many archives, exploring the interaction between these two parties is crucial to enhance resource discovery, understand how families may react to recordings, and address issues that occur when access is widened to rich, and often hitherto inaccessible, archived interviews. Through case studies the authors outline how archived recordings add crucial context to family research and explore how some families have reacted when accessing a relative’s audio interview, including how the interview intersects with existing family histories. These examples will prove informative for those working with collections that contain oral history, and help archivists, family historians and oral historians to make more use of archived resources. Finally the authors consider how internet access to catalogue data and archived recordings brings new perspectives to the researcher, but also poses ethical challenges. With a greater number of users of the data and recording – often without the need to visit the archive in person – it is necessary to explain whose voices and views are represented and the onus is on the oral history and archive communities to find innovative solutions to present oral histories in a manner which retains context and provenance.