Abstract
This article introduces a special issue on “family, memory, and identity.” Beginning with a survey of previous research in this area, especially exploring family as a site for collective memory, and the ways that family memory work shapes national histories, it introduces the contribution made by this special issue to our understanding of how family memory and national memory intertwine in the production of individual identity. Highlighting the key findings of the special issue, it particularly notes how family history research has the potential to challenge and reform national memory, and in doing so allows for rich and complex rethinkings of the past for both historians and members of the public.
Memory studies is a booming field, especially in the area of national memory. 1 How groups and collectives come to agree their histories has been a topic of considerable study. Maurice Halbwachs argued that family is a critical unit in the production of group memory in his formative writing in the field. 2 Despite this, the significance of family to group, and especially national memory, has only became a topic of extended research very recently. At first sight, family memory seems to be a very personal issue. When we inherit memory from parents and other family members, we also inherit identity, a sense of who we are and where we come from. Memory work within families plays a central part in establishing, negotiating, understanding, and adjusting personal identity. This is challenged when there is no family, or when the family contain secrets that are best untold. Yet, and as this special issue explores, family memory is not produced in isolation to wider social structures or culture. Rather the identities that are formed through family inheritances reflect the interactions between individuals, families, and nations—memories are formed at a variety of social levels and come to intersect and inform each other.
While not all scholars engage with his work directly, Halbwachs’ framework for collective memory has been significant in directing a scholarship on family memory, which can be grouped into discussions of genealogy and family history, intergenerational memory, histories through things, not least inheritances, and family memory as national memory, all topics in his own work. Family historians and genealogists have come to particular attention in recent years as family history has arisen as a popular hobby across the globe, and is supported through archive policies, television shows, and websites. 3 Yet, as historians have been quick to point out, genealogy is not new to the present generation, and families have deployed a wide range of other mechanisms for recording family lineages and stories to ensure the survival of the family over time. 4 Motivations for such actions have been of significant interest, starting with early research that emphasized the reputational interests in such remembrances as elite families sought to ensure their memory as people of note and worthy of their place in history. 5 More recently, we have attended to the role of such commemoration in identity construction, particularly exploring the affective dimension that engagements with our ancestors hold and the implications for the meaningfulness of heritage to producing individuals and family relationships. 6
As this suggests, a history of things has been central to such discussions, as the items that we pass down over generations become a key form of knowledge for families, either through the objects themselves, our emotional attachments to them, or the stories that we inherit alongside them. 7 As historians are showing, the array of items involved in this process can vary enormously, from family books, bibles, and identity paperwork, to furniture, books, and jewelry, to the ephemera of everyday life. 8 Such objects also hold significance as they move from families into museums and heritage collections, where families legacies become critical to the production of national memory. Whether in stories or objects, the histories that descend through families can offer narratives that shape our lives. As Inna Leykin argues in her discussion of the practice of “rodologia,” some groups have even recognized the psychological power of our ancestor’s histories, seeing them as providing “baggage” for individuals to work through and move past to enable a successful future. 9 If not everyone views their family heritages as so directive of their own behaviors, nonetheless inherited objects play a significant role in shaping how families preserve themselves and convey a sense of themselves to future generations.
As work on intergenerational transfers emphasizes, such family stories are not just a linear descent of information, but involve the reconstruction of information across generations, as part of a group negotiation. 10 At times, this reflects that different generations have different ideas about what stories should be told or in what form—what should be passed on and what should not—but also that storytelling can be a mutual engagement of narrator and audience, where not only who is listening but the purposes and contexts of a story’s performance are key to what is considered important. Thus, for example, a story of a parent’s childhood injury conveyed to warn a child from climbing a tree might take a different form from the way that story was told to others, and for different purposes. Family secrets are significant to such discussions, as forms of knowledge that are withheld or shared in confidence. 11 These contexts have implications for an evolving family memory, as well as individual identities.
Following a concern with how the family is defined, histories of family memory are also increasingly interested in groups whose family inheritances are less available or more contested. Attention has turned to how orphans, care-leavers, members of Stolen Generations communities (First Nations children removed from their families and often institutionalized), illegitimate children, fictive kin, and similar groups have made sense of who they are, where they came from, and how family history and memories can be deployed to construct family. Early work focused on the significance of access to records and information for groups whose family data was often held by institutions, as well as how people managed the often complex and painful material held in such records. 12 More recently, historians have worked with such groups to explore how they negotiated their histories and the families/selves that have emerged from such research. 13 These have enabled more nuanced accounts of identity formation, including the ways individuals reject and renarrate such histories to their own ends. As Delyth Edwards notes in reference both to the existence of such family histories and to their radical potentials, “stories outside the hegemony of the grand narrative do exist; it is just a matter of listening.” 14
Family histories are never made in isolation from wider culture, but in relation to other narratives, whether that is culturally significant ideas about what “normal families” are, or national histories that provide context for the experiences of our ancestors. 15 Recently historians have been especially interested in how family memory becomes a site for national memory to be reproduced. This has not least been the case for histories of war, where the military services of grandparents, through war medals, photographs of men in uniform, or surviving family letters, are deployed to further remembrance of these experiences and nationalist discourse. 16 Some historians have suggested the ways that national histories act to frame and guide family stories, even filling the “forgotten spaces of our autobiographies.” 17 Others have highlighted how ancestor’s experience of trauma—such as in the Holocaust or through colonial violence—can be inherited across generations, a knowledge often formed through silences and secrets. 18 Alternatively, and sometimes connected with the history-making of “oppressors,” such as the Nazis, family histories can become sites to reinterpret and downplay ancestral wrongdoing, a rejection of uncomfortable national heritages. 19
If national heritages are used in the production of family memory—actions that of course reinforce such collective memory by tying it to personal identity—family memory is also significant in shaping national heritage. Histories of the family are often used in museums and similar heritage sites in the construction of national narratives, sometimes naturalizing stories of the past for audiences. 20 Much of the archival material that survives and is used by historians emerges from families, although not all historians acknowledge its “familial” origins when they write. There is also recognition of especially elite families and how they used commemorations to themselves to insert themselves within national memory. 21 National histories are often family histories, and personal identity emerges from their intersections.
The contributions to this special issue join this conversation, exploring how family histories and national histories intersect and inform each other, as well as the role of individuals in such processes. As such, negotiations of family and national memory also become opportunities for identity construction, whether of the individual in the family or the citizen in the state. The articles in this issue provide perspectives that range from early modern England to contemporary Australia and Denmark and use an array of sources from wills to institutional records to interviews and oral histories. Retelling national history within the frame of a family history actualizes history and structures of history for society today. In this respect, working with family memory produces ethical considerations, not least as retelling such histories has implications for personal identity. This is perhaps not least the case for histories that involve individuals who are still alive, and who are left to renegotiate the self through the histories we make but which build on their memories. Yet as Tanya Evans argues, the radical potential of family history lies in the fact that it allows ordinary members of the public to contribute to national narratives, and to offer alternatives histories and cultural discourses both for individuals and collectives. 22
Family Memory and National Memory
The interaction between family and national memory is a key theme of this special issue. Family memory is explored in both producing national memory and as disrupting national narratives across historical periods. As shown by Katie Barclay and Stephanie Thomson, family memory practices can play a significant role in enabling national narratives, as well as personal identity. Their article highlights how elite women’s connection of faith and the remembrance of family impacted the formation of English churches and the surrounding community in a period of religious and political instability following the Reformation. Through a study of early modern wills and testaments, they explore how women’s religious patronage at end of life contributed not only to creating family identity, but also to making a shifting religious environment meaningful after the Reformation. Commemoration of family identity and relationships became a site to negotiate and refigure religious practice and belief that allowed for strong elements of continuity of identity and devotion across the Reformation. In doing so, these women also ensured that their families were central to the narratives of the newly emerging Protestant state.
Ashley Barnwell argues that stories we share within families are “deep stories,” crucial for our understanding of the world, and our identity. Through a study of self-published family histories of Australian settlement, she shows how family histories offer an insight into how national history is narrated, circulated, and interpreted within families, and thus that family histories and memories of past events are not only about the family, but about the family’s role in the events of the nation. This draws our attention to practicing family history as a form of national identity work and families as a place where colonial histories can be told, edited, reshaped, and silenced. Asking how authors of family stories seek to keep or break inherited silences around the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, Barnwell explores how Australian families use inherited stories and memories to rationalize and reproduce, and to interrogate and challenge, silences about Australia’s violent past. Family histories are not necessarily sites for a conservative vision of the nation, but can reflect moments where individuals reconsider what it means to be Australian and to be the inheritor of their family’s legacy.
Tanya Evans argues for the potential influence of family historians on national narratives through their linking of private memory and national history and the insertion of “familial microhistories into global macro histories.” Through the complex histories of diverse families—including groups marginalized due to gender, class, race, and sexuality—that emerge in family history research, the public come to produce accounts of the past that act as an alternative to well-known national narratives. As Evans’ work with family historians suggest, such encounters encourage family historians to collaborate with academic historians, not least those working on minority family histories, and enables both the foregrounding of alternative historiographies of the nation and the dissemination of such knowledges. As importantly, family historians also bring their research, knowledge, and analysis to academic histories, an opportunity that Evans encourages for its potential to not only transform national history but the academic practices that underpin national discourses.
Among the family historians whose narratives are changing national histories are those of minority groups who use such research to uncover their own family stories. Stine Grønbæk Jensen highlights the complex process through which engagements with family histories enable new relationships between individuals, society, and nation. Care leaver’s memories are often of broken family ties. Using interviews with care leavers, Jensen shows the practices and processes through which care leavers try to reconstruct fragmented memories of childhood and a family they had been told to forget, and how such narratives of the past shape their self. In seeking out biological families, care leavers often risk rejection in the hope of accessing family relationships and memories, a process that highlights the importance of a sense of belonging to personal identity. Following Janet Carsten, Jensen highlights that even when encounters with families entail more rejection and pain, they can nonetheless provide the stories that help people understand who they are and enable them to resolve difficult pasts. 23 Such memory work also reveals national histories as a history of family, where the individual histories of care leavers become the evidence that frames public debate around the role of state institutions in caring for children and the implications of such legacies for how the nation thinks about itself. In this, as Evans suggests for family historians, the memory work of care leavers can have transformative potential for national histories.
National histories are similarly rewritten through the memory of “children born of war.” Martina Koegeler-Abdi’s analysis of intergenerational family secrets show how the identity of “Danish German children born war” conflicted with Danish national history and so the existence of foreign soldiers as fathers was hidden by both nation and family after the war. Family secrecy for this group was not only traumatic, but also a powerful and thus ambivalent form of knowledge management. While family secrets could be harmful and exert a form of “slow violence” on children, they could also be protective, offering a way to store information until it was safe to process, usually following the mother’s death. From her interviews with children born of war, Koegeler-Abdi points out how many of the children accepted the disadvantages the secrets brought for themselves in order to protect their mother’s wellbeing and to keep functioning within existing family hierarchies as well as the national memory of the war. If this was the case during childhood, as adults—free to research their pasts—their histories enabled a retelling of the Danish experience of occupation and acted as a demand that such children be welcomed into the nation.
Both Jensen and Koegeler-Abdi highlight the way in which family stories are framed by and seen in the light of national memory, how the family memory is seen as part of the national memory of events, but also how the national narrative is challenged when the personal experience of family memories does no longer fits the national narrative. The distance from events with which family memories are used to challenge national narratives also shows the personal costs in admitting to a personal identity that does not fit into the national memory. The personal strategies shown in allowing these familial and national secrets to become part of collective memory ascribe a certain strength to marginalized people, often seen as victims of history.
If family histories are both shaped by and shape national history, this relationship can also be mediated by the state, complicating how identity is produced. In her case-study of an eighteenth-century court case concerning a disobedient boy and a broken family, Koefoed argues that part of reestablishing parental authority and an identity as a responsible family in the eyes of the state-authorities, involved negotiating a narrative of past events with the state. She shows how the family’s representation of itself was slowly adjusted to the state’s expectations of a good Christian household and of responsible parents, but also emphasizes the space available for parents in this process of re-remembering. The changing narrative of the parents of a delinquent youth are understood as part of a mediation in which memories of past events are used to create recognizable cultural identities, and in that process legitimize state institutions by acknowledging their authority in relation to broken families. These negotiations of family memory reveal the contested areas in family identity in a given context, as well as in the relationship between family and the state. Family memory in these cases became a form of public memory, the social process of memory aimed at creating and upholding family identity is moved from inside the family to the courtroom. In doing so, family memory and identity became a matter of national concern.
Inheritances of Memory
If family memory practices intersect with national memory in the production of personal identity, then inheritances play a critical role in this process, whether those transmitted through the family or held about the family by institutions. Just as academic histories produce narratives from surviving source material, so do families utilize the traces of the past to produce stories of both group and their place in national histories. This is a theme that emerges across the special issue, as individuals and groups engage in the process of memory production. It is perhaps most evident in Barclay and Thomson’s reflection on the moment of “inheritance”—of property transfer across generations—as an opportunity to ensure the ongoing legacy of the family in the institutional (religious) structures of Reformation England. In doing so, families wove themselves into the fabric of religious change. For many—who left their mark on buildings or provided patronage for key people—these efforts to preserve family over time were also interventions in the making of a national heritage and long-term cultural memory.
Inheritances could thus be deployed to actively produce history, but like other historical sources, they also captured something of history as well as the self. The records that survive of the court case in Koefoed’s article highlight how family drama became a site for institutions—those prosecuting the family and the court that mediated—to make themselves, their values and expectations known. If this case is an example of how family memory can be required to conform to powerful norms, this family also provided an opportunity for the state to determine what the respectable family was and should be; such explorations and their recursive impacts contributed to the slow but ongoing evolution of family law. This family’s behavior was part of the making of the state and through it the nation, a form of ongoing inheritance of another sort.
Inheritances take multiple forms and as the other essays in this issue highlight, the production of the past over generations often relies less on a substantive body of material than the ephemeral traces, the searched for missing ancestor, or the secrets and silences, that we combine and interpret to make sense of ourselves. As the all the authors in this issue suggest, these moments of investigation refuse the separation of private and public domains of knowledge, and tie families into national histories, and nations into family stories. In contrast to inheritances that were centered in public spaces (like churches) or in public records (like court cases), Jensen and Koegeler-Abdi’s inheritances were refused to their subjects, a separation from their pasts with effects on self-knowledge, but also suggestive of the ways that past inheritances are critical to the formation and continuance of memory. Barnwell’s family histories were produced in response to such memories, as families tried to narrate an identity from traces of their ancestor’s lives—a process that required strategic ignorance and acknowledgment in producing timely narratives but also commemorating family in ways people found comfortable.
In all these cases, inheritances are not static sites of knowledge or knowing but opportunities for exchange and engagement with our ancestors, for renegotiation and reknowing. As in any history, storytelling becomes critical here, but the narratives produced were not simple fictions. Rather these inheritances provided moments to grapple with past and present, self and other, personal and collective memory, and individual and group identity. As Evans concludes this is the critical value of family history research; family histories, produced through encounters with heritage, are moments where individuals come to the past in its complexity and are provided with opportunities to rethink and contest collective and national memories. In this, family history can be as productive in making history for the general public as academic scholarship.
Conclusion
Family memory is not only about families. It is intertwined with national memory, where families use it, or silence it, retell it, and change it, in the process of inheritance. Family memories, what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what meaning such memories hold, are framed by national memory. This is a dynamic process. National narratives about family life can be confirmed, challenged, or rewritten through familial memory work. Memory is not a stable recollection of the past. It is negotiated, changed, and legitimized, within families, but also between families and groups. Investigating, retelling, and recreating family memory can thus be a process of changing national history from below.
Untold family memories and family secrets, as well as difficult family histories, have the potential of challenging the national narrative, once they can be told, but often secrets have to be inherited before this can happen. This raises the question of when powerful national memories, such as experiences of wartime, can be changed by personal memories. When and how in the process of inheritance of memory is it possible to change the narrative? How many generations does it require, and when has too much time passed? Memory is essential to our identity and even when family is lacking, or family history painful, recreating a memory of our personal lineage is part of identity work, at both an individual and national level. Retelling family stories of ancestors’ roles in contested parts of the national history can be part of acknowledging the difficult inheritances within national memory, and can be a key site where people from all backgrounds come to critically reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves and the nation. Exploring how families that are new to the nation, or who combine multiple national identities, negotiate this process is an interesting area for further research.
Working with family memories also provides an opportunity to bring marginalized people into history. Personal stories are given importance and tied into national stories; individuals are given agency when their memory work is made part of the national memory. Family history research also challenges what we count as history and opens up our discipline to other forms of research, perspectives, and narratives. Moving forward, collaborations between academic historians and family history researchers has the potential to enable new forms of historical work and national memories to be produced. Working with the family histories held privately in families also provides a key opportunity to diversify the archive and to engage with how historic archive collection policies have directed the forms of historical memory that become important to the nation. The intersections of family, memory, and identity therefore provide a range of future directions for a more democratic and engaged historical practice by both researchers and the public. This special issue contributes to a conversation about how this happens.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Denmark, for funding a workshop from which this special issue arose. We are grateful to all the participants and attendees for their contributions in helping us think about this topic.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Katie Barclay's contribution to this research was funded under a EURIAS (European Institutes for Advanced Studies) Fellowship, Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Denmark (Co-funded by Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, Grant Agreement Number 609400).