In a society preoccupied with the future, genealogists or family historians devote a great deal of effort to constructing family ancestry on paper and in the mind, and situating the ancestral family in its historic time and place. This study explores the temporal orientations, and the content of these orientations, which genealogists bring to this activity. Findings are reported from a 1994 mail survey of 1348 members of a Canadian genealogical society. In addition, this paper examines the relationship between historical time and autobiographical time, and the impact of the family historian role on personal identity and family culture.
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