Family History and Life Writing

This Special Issue of Life Writing emerged from a workshop initially co-organised by Jerome de Groot and Tanya Evans. They planned to hold this in collaboration with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in Kent Street, Sydney, Australia in April 2020. Evans had previously collaborated with SAG on several occasions since 2012 through different research projects on family history (Evans 2015, 2022). These collaborations included interactive talks, help with recruitment on family history research projects, the dissemination of research on the practice and meanings of family history and networking among family historians. At the time, de Groot and Evans were co-authoring an article on the value of collaborative public history projects in Australia and Britain, both focused on their international engagements with the family history community (Evans, de Groot, and Stallard Forthcoming). They held two successful, lively, interactive, participatory and well-attended workshops including international scholarly researchers on family history together with family historians at Manchester City Library in the UK in September 2017 (de Groot and Evans 2017) and at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney in July 2018 (Evans and de Groot 2019). Covid 19 prevented Jerome’s travel to Australia in early 2020 and the whole world went into lockdown soon after. We hoped the workshop might encourage everyone to re-evaluate the research practices and interests of family historians which we knew to be often scathingly defined by others as unscientific, uncritical, emotional and of little value to the academy or anyone else bar individual researchers’ families. Nonetheless, family history has become phenomenally popular world-wide. It is through their families that millions of people, all over the world, first engage with the subject of history, listening to family stories over the years and being told about where they sit in their family trees. Psychologists have revealed that these family stories about the past are crucial to an individual’s sense of identity and well-being (Moore, Rosenthal, and Robinson 2020). Family history is understood by a range of sociologists and human geographers in Europe and Australia to have an important role in identity-formation (Bottero 2015; Kramer 2011). As Nash suggests, family history individualises the past (Nash 2002). National surveys across the globe have revealed the overwhelming centrality of family to people’s understanding of history everywhere (Ashton and Hamilton 2003, 135; Conrad et al. 2013). However, as Evans has demonstrated in her work, family historians are an enormous and still often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research systems. They are a community who are mostly but not always situated outside the academy, often marginalised by the mainstream. They have been dismissed for their naiveté and amateurism and are ridiculed for seeking emotional connections with the past lives of their forebears (Evans 2022). In this Special Issue we continue to interrogate these assumptions here and show how scholars are engaging with family history and how family history is enabling a huge number of people to think historically and to produce distinctive forms of historical understanding that