Abstract
Using an interdisciplinary research methodology across three archaeological and historical case studies, this article explores “family archives.” Four themes illustrate how objects held in family archives, curation practices, and intergenerational narratives reinforce a family’s sense of itself: people–object interactions, gender, socialization and identity formation, and the “life course.” These themes provide a framework for professional archivists to assist communities and individuals working with their own family archives. We argue that the family archive, broadly defined, encourages a more egalitarian approach to history. We suggest a multiperiod analysis draws attention to historical forms of knowledge and meaning-making practices over time.
Highlights
Using an interdisciplinary research methodology across three archaeological and historical case studies, this article explores “family archives.” Four themes illustrate how objects held in family archives, curation practices, and intergenerational narratives reinforce a family’s sense of itself: people–object interactions, gender, socialization and identity formation, and the “life course.” These themes provide a framework for professional archivists to assist communities and individuals working with their own family archives
After considering the methodology used to combine insights from a range of academic disciplines and addressing the issues around defining an archive and a family, this article considers four main ways in which families have approached collating and curating their possessions. These themes consider the way people interact with objects, the significance of gender within the family archive, how family archives shape the formation of identity, and the role the archive plays in marking the progression and form of the social life course
As part of our acknowledgment of the importance of informality and chaos to this process, we take a broad view of how to define a family archive and, a “family.” While we focus on tangible items that families might curate and pass down, they cannot be artificially separated from intangible items; often unremarkable objects become valuable precisely because of the role they play in a remembered family anecdote, event, or connection to an individual
Summary
A massive growth of interest in family history and genealogy as a hobby, seen in the popularity of television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and websites such as ancestry.com, reflects a public fascination with personal and family pasts. The dedication of Ted Walker’s autobiography, for example, reads “For My Family—Present, Past and Future.”[11] Using these documents can tell us both about which objects individuals kept, treasured, and used to remember and their reflections about this matter in older age as they write, directly and indirectly engaging with the very processes of making history Autobiographers often use their writing to document significant histories, to tell these stories while they can, or to set the record straight in later life. These texts are useful for thinking about subjectivity and family archives; though published for a particular audience, they are highly revealing in terms of the ways in which individuals make sense of their own life and want to present that history to others
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