Family memory,‘things’ and counterfactual thinking

Introduction

Leora Auslander (2005) argued a decade ago that historians conventionally neglect the evidence of material culture, despite being rich sources ‘for grasping the affective, communicative, symbolic, and expressive aspects of human life that are central to the historical project’ (p. 1016). At that time, an influential body of work had drawn attention to sites of collective memory (e.g. Halbwachs, 1992; Lowenthal, 1998; Nora, 1992[1984]; Winter, 1995), but since the publication of Auslander’s call for action, the interdisciplinary scholarly investigation into the meanings of material culture has turned into a flood.

The earlier research into sites of collective memory, as the editors of the recent special issue of Memory Studies pointed out, tended to prioritize mind over matter and regard the material world as ‘an intentional extension of the mind, a preservation device designed to bring the past to life for future generations or future versions of ourselves’ (Freeman et al., 2016: 7). This failed, the editors continue, to see the ‘imagination value’ in our encounters with objects and the ‘involuntary and poetic effects of the material world on our experiences with the past and consequently a sense of agency imbued in materiality itself’. In other words, the relationship between memory and material culture is an active, creative engagement between subject and object.

In this article, we wish to take up the notion of the ‘imagination value’ implicit within the relationship between memory and material culture in the context of oral histories of the family. As such, this is also a contribution to the emerging field of mnemohistory, exploring the ways in which ‘the present is “haunted” by the past and the past is modelled, invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present’ (Tamm, 2015: 3). In the 1920s, Maurice Halbwachs (1992) argued that families are powerful mnemonic communities, whose orally transmitted stories and memories can transcend the individual’s lifespan (p. 62; see also Erll, 2011). More recently, in a developmental context, Fivush and Merrill (2016) also argued that individual biography is ‘deeply informed by multiple systems of family narratives and family history’ (p. 306). The authors acknowledge, however, that as yet we know ‘little about how individuals incorporate these cultural and family history narratives into their own frameworks for developing personal narrative identity …’ (p. 312). In pluralist, democratic societies, comparatively little attention has been given to the ways in which descendants absorb and adopt over-arching family narrative frameworks in the context of their own life histories and identities.

Research into the role of objects in family memory is even more recent, and interesting theoretical and methodological insights have emerged from the use of photographic images and family albums in second-generation family memory (Freund and Thomson, 2011; Kuhn, 2002; Tinkler, 2013). This approach has been adopted, in particular, with the descendants of Holocaust survivors, exploring the impact of traumatic memory. Marianne Hirsch, for example, proposed the concept of ‘postmemory’ to encapsulate the process of remembering at ‘generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’ (Hirsch, 1997: 22). Postmemory, she suggests, describes the ‘experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events …’ In the following study, we will demonstrate the power of objects and things, rather than photographs, to symbolize family narratives of calamity or adversity in the past and frame the narratives of descendants. But these cannot be defined as traumatic memories, nor do they entirely ‘evacuate’ the life stories of descendants. Rather, these family narratives and associated things from the past trigger counterfactual thinking (Byrne, 2005; Mandel et al., 2007; Roese and Olson, 2014) and the fluid adoption of identities from earlier generations rather than present-day circumstances.

But first some qualifications regarding the definitions and terminology are widely utilized in the study of memory and material culture. The items that acquired particular significance in these family narratives did not necessarily correspond to definitions of material culture since they were not all made by human hand. Nor were they always inherited. There was also a clear distinction in the oral histories between ‘objects’ that were invested with comparatively little emotional or mnemonic significance and ‘things’ that resonated powerfully through the family narrative (see Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Maines and Glynn, 1993). This difference between objects and things has been defined as follows:

Things, in contrast to objects, have more aura and more distance; they are constituted by human relationships with objects and are therefore imbued with memory. Objects become mnemonic things when they become part of a meaningful assemblage, when they have rubbed up against the human in a memorable way (or when the human has rubbed up against them), and when traces of past experiences have been created with and held within them. (Freeman et al., 2016: 4)

This distinction between objects and things will underpin this analysis, exploring the ways in which postmemory and counterfactual memory may invest things with significance in family narratives.

Two contrasting perspectives from history and anthropology reflect opposing ends of an analytical or interpretive spectrum relating to material culture and family memory. In the 1990s, the American historian John Gillis (1997) found that the domestic display of family objects and photographs was at the core of personal identity:

Our efforts to construct and maintain the families we live by take a multitude of forms, many of them astonishingly elaborate. Our desire to represent ourselves has turned our living rooms into family portrait galleries and our attics into archives. Our residences are mini-museums, filled with heirlooms, mementos, and souvenirs of family. (p. xvi)

The family mini-museums, Gillis suggests, represent the imagined ‘nurturing and protective’ family of myth and legend, the idealized family that we ‘live by’, rather than the fragmented and challenging reality of the families that we live ‘with’ (Gillis, p. xv).

More recently, a significant body of work on the collection and display of objects within the home has emerged from the discipline of anthropology, with its long-held scholarly interest in material culture and identity formation. Interviews with residents from a random London street about their domestic collections of objects led Daniel Miller to the conclusion that while ‘material objects are … an integral and inseparable aspect of all relationships’, inherited family possessions or objects play a minor role (Miller, 2008: 286). Indeed, Miller (2008) commented that ‘unlike much psychology, this book allows for the possibility that parents are not particularly influential’ and that later experiences may have as much or more impact upon the work in progress that is individual identity (p. 291).

Nonetheless, Miller appears to agree with Gillis when he suggests that the objects families do elect to preserve or display symbolize the times ‘when the relationship came closest to its ideal’ (Miller and Parrott, 2009: 506). This association between material objects or artefacts and ‘feelings of well-being and belonging’ may also be found in recent work of anthropologists exploring the wider historical circulation of commodities and things in a global context of widespread migration (Svašek, 2012: 2). The relationship between material culture and family memory in the following research project, however, appears more complex than these conclusions about the positive affective resonance of family material objects permit. While the reasons given for keeping many objects often centred on economic value or aesthetic considerations, in four families the eldest generation talked about material things that were invested with significance but did not represent either Gillis’ family we ‘live by’ or the happiest moments of family life. These mnemonic things – a house, wedding ring, horseshoe and bottle of shells – raise the question why families would keep or reference things that represent difficult turning points in the family’s past? How do things of this nature contribute to the ongoing construction of family narratives and personal identity?

The following exploration of the relationship between inherited or acquired things and stories about the family’s past is based upon oral history interviews conducted in 2009 and 2010 with 12 multigenerational families in Devon and Cornwall (Green, 2013). In order to generate an oral history cohort that extended beyond community elites and maximized socio-economic diversity, potential participants were initially approached directly by letter, following random sampling of two electorate lists. Three of the four families that are the focus of this article joined the research project this way. The first electorate encompassed a working-class community surrounding a naval dockyard, and the second consisted of a small cathedral city with a large rural hinterland. Families ranged from two to four generations, and we recorded oral histories with one member from each adult generation. Women dominated the oral history cohort: seven families were composed entirely of women, four of women and men and one of men only. Driven by the desire to have a record of the memories of the oldest generation, the majority of women volunteering their family to participate in this project came from a middle generation between adult children and elderly parents. The preponderance of women is consistent with the findings of earlier research in the United States and may reflect traditional roles and expectations within the family, but the relationship between gender and family narratives about the past remains under-researched (De St Aubin et al., 2004: 19; Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998: 30; Stone, 2009: 20).

In all but one family, the oral history interviews were recorded with each person individually, primarily to ensure that younger generations were able to express independently what they remembered and the meanings they attached to family stories. The interviews included both autobiographical life narratives and the stories about family forebears that had been passed down the generations. Content, narrative form and generational reception, therefore, were the primary foci of the project. The over-arching family narratives were often found to revolve around a peripeteia (Bruner, 2002: 28): an unexpected event that had taken the family in a different, sometimes downward, direction or put the family’s survival at risk. Contrary to contemporary approaches to family memory and identity in sociology and social psychology, which emphasize the positive, ‘generative’, functions of family stories about the past (Bertaux and Thompson, 2007; De St Aubin et al., 2004), many of those recorded focused upon economic insecurity and emotional instability, lack of trust or violence. Survival was the strongest single theme, that of enduring the vicissitudes of life (Green, 2013: 397). In the stories that follow, we will suggest that the narrative peripeteia may also be symbolized in the form of a thing, which carries within it an element of counterfactual thinking, of alternative paths not taken, the ‘what if’ of family memory.

Material objects

Participants in this research identified a wide range of objects associated with family forebears, but most did not appear to be particularly significant for the construction of the over-arching family narrative or personal identity. References to inherited and acquired family objects and photographs emerged both spontaneously and in response to specific questions asked towards the end of the interviews. Again, in contrast to Gillis, we found that relatively few framed photographs of the family members, past or present, were visible in the public areas of our interviewees’ homes. Some interviewees mentioned photograph collections in the attic, held either by another family member or by branch of the family, or sent back from the family diaspora overseas, and these photographs and albums may play an important role at wider family gatherings (Clark, 2011). But for others these boxes of photographs appeared to have little meaning since the images lacked names or identifying details. ¹ Only two interviewees voluntarily brought out photographs of earlier generations to illustrate their stories.

Just as photographs of earlier generations were not visible or even easily accessed, heirlooms, mementos or souvenirs relating to the family’s past were also rarely on display. When asked about family objects, Y drew attention to the family’s poverty in the past and talked about how her family ‘had to live by hand to mouth’ in a struggle for ‘survival’. Consequently, ‘we don’t have any heirlooms, nothing passed on’ (Y, F7, Truro, 19 March 2009, 20.00–25.00). Another reflected regretfully on the loss of family ‘stuff’ when moving houses (C, F1, 17 January 2009, 15.00–20.00). For those who identified family objects, their answers fell into two categories. First, a range of similar items had been inherited along gender lines, often described briefly with what appeared to be relatively little emotional valence. Second, meriting much longer and specific stories and greater emotional expression, four interviewees identified things that symbolized a key turning point in the family’s geographical mobility, economic fortunes or emotional survival in the past.

Before exploring these two categories of family objects further, it might be helpful to clarify our approach to the emotions and what emotional responses to objects or ‘things’ might entail. The emotions may be defined in a number of different ways since they involve a complex set of components and interactions (Lindquist, 2013: 356–368; Green and Troup, 2016: 405). As the linguist Anna Wierzbicka (1999) pointed out, the term emotion ‘combines in its meaning a reference to “feeling”, a reference to “thinking”, and a reference to a person’s body’ (p. 2). The psychological constructionist approach to the emotions reflects these tripartite dimensions, suggesting that emotions emerge from the process of using knowledge and memory of prior experience to make meaning out of sensory inputs from both the body and the world around us (Lindquist et al., 2012: 123–124).

Interpretation of the emotional significance attached to objects or ‘things’ by the interviewees recorded for this study, therefore, draws upon both the oral/aural and narrative dimensions of oral history. It is through narrative that interviewees seek to make meaning and impose coherence upon experience and memories, and key stories that appear to crystallize the family history are often transmitted across the generations (Finnegan, 2006: 177–178). Here, we will focus upon four specific stories about things, and these stories have been analysed within the framework of the individual narrative as a whole, those of other members of the family and the wider social and cultural discursive context. The interaction in the oral history interview also plays a role in interpretive practice. Stories transmitted orally have the added communicative and performative dimensions of intonation, volume, velocity, duration and pauses that are intended to convey to the listener the emotional meaning or significance of particular stories (Portelli, 1991: 46–48). While there are, as Portelli points out, no fixed interpretative rules regarding these dimensions of oral expression, the interviewer remains alert to changes in narrative rhythm that signal emotional responses or attitudinal change.

Returning to the responses relating to family objects and things, research in the contemporary private, domestic context has drawn attention to the gendered division of inherited objects and the role of material culture in the construction of present-day identities (Ash, 1996; Hurdley, 2006; Kirk and Sellen, 2010; Pollak, 2011; Wilton, 2008). Fiona Parrott has argued that keeping objects that belonged to earlier generations is less an attempt to exercise control over the arbitrariness of death than an extension of the idea of the museum and collecting as an identity practice in everyday lives. In the context of the family, this identity practice is gendered. For example, Parrott found that men were remembered through ‘masculine goods related to work, hobbies or sports’ (Gibson, 2008; Parrott, 2011: 292). This was also evident in our study, although there was one exception, the grandmother who had preserved the baby clothes and lock of hair from her much-loved grandfather (U, F3, Truro, 2 February 2009, 25.00–30.00). Most objects relating to male forebears, however, linked the individual life to national war narratives, working lives and sporting triumphs. These included references to a father’s war medals from the First World War, popularly known as ‘Pip, Squeak and Alfred’, a fragment of metal from the Battle of Jutland, navy writing slope, gold watch and boxing trophies (C, F1, Truro, 17 January 2009, 35.00–40.00; U, F3, Truro, 2 February 2009, 15.00–20.00; X, F2, Newquay, 13 January 2009, 1.10.00–1.15.00).

It is less easy to see a similar national or public identity process at play in the memories of female forebears. Objects passed down from grandmothers to their daughters and granddaughters were also gender specific, such as jewellery, foreign dolls collected during travels overseas, glassware, fur coats and Poole pottery (O, F4, Truro, 4 December 2008, 25.00–30.00; I, F11, Truro, 27 August 2010, 20.00–25.00; Q, F10, St Austell, 4 May 2010, 2.05.00–2.10.00; Z, F1, Truro, 20 January 2009, 15.00–20.00). Most women interviewees invoked judgements of value or taste in the decision whether or not to keep or wear their grandmother’s items, and this is consistent with the findings of Gibson and Woodward (Gibson, 2008: Chapter 1; Woodward, 2001). For example, one young woman who inherited some of her grandmother’s jewellery made the following comment:

I’ve got my Mum’s Mum jewellery box, she gave me that when I was in my teens, I think. It’s put away in the loft, it’s not the sort of thing you want to wear … brooches, things like that, it’s not the sort of thing I want to lose or anything like that … Do you wear the jewellery at all? No, no it seems too precious, you know, and a lot of it is not really to my taste because of the age of it. I’m not into brooches anyway, but it’s enough for me to say I’m going to hang on to that and put it in a safe place and just leave it there (laughter). (V, F2, Weston-Super-Mare, 16 February 2009, 5.00–10.00)

In contrast, a middle-aged woman identified a small ceramic pot of a tree stump with two cherubs that had belonged to a great grandmother as her favourite possession, although she did not know why it appealed to her so much and it was stored in the attic rather than on public display (R, F3, Truro, 19 January 2009, 5.00–10.00). Many of these gendered objects appeared to carry relatively little affective investment relating to a specific ancestor, and aesthetic or economic value judgements primarily underlay the importance attached to them by female descendants.

However, in four families, specific things elicited extended narratives by the eldest generation that reflected deep emotional investment. Two of these things, a house and a gold ring, have economic value, but the remaining two, a horseshoe and a bottle of shells, do not. Nor does the last, the bottle of shells, fit the definition of material culture, that is, human made by hand or machine (Auslander, 2005: 1015). And finally, only two of these things had been inherited. Each was attached to a key story in the family narrative, reflecting a peripeteia or turning point in the family’s location and/or welfare. The house and wedding ring, with which we will begin, also contain strong dimensions of performative agency, projecting cultural ideals and meanings. As pointed out earlier, scholarly analyses conventionally rest upon the ways in which subjects read meaning into objects (Graves-Brown, 2000: 4). But can objects be active agents in their own right? Drawing upon the work of Bruno Latour, Auslander (2005) argues that objects, ‘in their communicative, performative, emotive, and expressive capacities … act, have effects in the world. Without the crown, orb, and scepter, for example, a monarch is not a monarch’ (p. 1017; Domanska, 2006: 340–341). Miller (2005) describes this as a dialectical relationship, with the object also having the potential to make the subject. To what extent do ‘the things people make, make people’ (pp. 11–15, 36–38), or in the context of this study, houses or wedding rings make family stories?

Houses

The material object to which nearly all the interviewees made reference during the course of their oral history was a house. This was the single most important aspect of material culture identified by participants in this research, reflecting the significance attached to home ownership in public and political discourse in contemporary British society. The ownership of a house was generally taken by many of those interviewed to indicate the stable, economically secure trajectory of the family over more than one generation. Asked about the economic fortunes of her family from past to present, one young woman in her mid-30s, a clerical worker, replied, ‘I think it’s stayed pretty much the same. I don’t know, I suppose everyone’s always had their own house, so not Council. As far as I know we’ve always been about the same …’(V, F2, Weston-Super-Mare, 16 February 2009,15.00–20.00). And in another family, a grandfather, born in 1928, responded to the following question by reference to the ages when members of the family had acquired property:

Do you think that the future of your family will be different to its past? Yes, it’s bound to be really, isn’t it. Bound to be. I mean, already you can see it because my mother and father bought their first property when he was fifty, fifty-five, something like that. I and my brother bought our first property when we were twenty-eight. My grandsons have been buying their own property since they were in their early twenties. That’s a big difference. It really means that every generation really is better off than the previous one. Materially speaking. (N, F7, London, 15 December 2008, 40.00–45.00)

In contrast, the large, solid houses that had belonged to grandparents could be emblematic of a decline in family fortunes. One woman, born in 1965 and working in school administration, recalled that her maternal grandparents were ‘quite wealthy’, with a ‘big house in Stoke’, but thought there would be much less money around for her daughter’s generation (K, F5, Plymouth, 22 December 2008, 10.00–15.00). Another, born in 1944 to a colonial service family in India, worried that her children were struggling to own their own homes, unlike earlier family generations (I, F11, Truro, 27 August 2010, interviewer’s notes). Houses that were no longer in family ownership were visible material markers framing family trajectories across the generations, reflecting not only economic security but also social status. A middle-aged woman from a family of teachers, proud of her long farming ancestry in Cornwall, recounted the earliest story about the family that she knew. Her paternal grandmother used to say that

they came from quite a grand family, it was a very big house, and that her father, that they’d had plenty of money and I think it was her father … who was a bit of a gambler, a bit of a wastrel, and had wasted a lot of money, had gambled the money away’. (P, F4, Truro, 2 February 2009, 35.00–40.00)

Regaining what had been lost in terms of farm, house and middle-class status structured this interviewee’s family narrative.

Lost houses could also generate counterfactual thinking and imagined pasts. One family story, in particular, exemplifies this theme. E, born in 1930, had spent her life working in retail and caring for her mother. She also began her life history by describing her mother’s farming grandparents who lived in a big farmhouse and owned a pony and trap. She then moved to the present, commenting that everyone else in the family had ‘got their own place’ now, including condominiums in Spain, and that ‘I’m just the poor relation now (laughter), I am, yes. We are who we are, we are who we are. Everybody else got their own place …’ (F, F12, Plymouth, 8 December 2009, 10.00–15.00). This family narrative revolved around the loss of an inheritance, as her daughter explained:

We’ve never really been able to get to the bottom of anything because nobody seemed to keep evidence of anything, and Grandad was, from what I can gather, never wrote anything down, and if he had any money it was probably stashed under the bed, under a mattress or something. He was never one for actually detailing anything at all. From what I can gather there were some papers on this boat that related to either a lodge or a hall … It was very difficult to actually piece together from bits of information, because what we gathered I think there was somebody sleeping on the boat, don’t even know who that was, and … I think they were trying to destroy evidence that was on this boat, which Mum believes was paperwork connected to a hall or a lodge. Now whether that was to come down into the family, not sure, it’s always been very vague. Just this story of this boat that was set alight … (H, F12, Plymouth, 8 December 2009, 45.00–50.00)

This account of the loss of the deeds to the house is followed by a reflection on the difference inheriting the house would have made to her mother, creating the conditions for a different and more secure past:

My Mum should have got that house, and never got it, for whatever reason … Makes you think, what would have happened, would it have helped their life, you know, which path would they have taken? I don’t think Mum would have ever lived there, because it’s an area she knows nothing really about … but I think, you know, obviously life could have been made easier, they could have sold it …( H, 45.00–50.00)

The explicit counterfactual coda draws attention to the very different path a mother’s life might have taken had the legacy eventuated. This interview was the only one conducted in a collective context, with mother, daughter and other family members contributing to the story. The collective narrative included animated discussion concerning identification of the specific house, believed to be a large Georgian building on the other side of town. It was clear that the story about the ‘lost house’ had been passed down across the generations in more than one part of the family and performed an important mnemonic function explaining the family trajectory over time.

In this case, a multigenerational family interview demonstrated the capacity of the eldest generation to identify a thing that embodied the family story, thereby establishing the narrative theme for the expression of collective family memory on that occasion. In the remaining three families, whose oral history interviews were recorded separately, only the eldest generation symbolized the over-arching family narrative in the form of a particular material thing that was in their possession. But the content and themes of the narratives attached to the thing by the eldest generation in these families also resonated powerfully in the oral histories of the youngest generation, although a different temporal framework was at work. Their orientation was more towards the future than the past and the family stories formed the counterpoint to their hopes and expectations, whereas for the older generation the stories reflected lives lived and paths not taken.

The wedding ring

The following story was narrated by the middle-aged mother of the family and emerged spontaneously rather than as an answer to a question about family objects. It takes up the first three-quarters of an hour of the recorded interview. J was born in 1960 into a wealthy Surrey family that revolved around the maternal grandparents: ‘there was a very formal, hierarchical structure in the family that made it very easy to navigate around it, and also very easy to know where you stood within the hierarchy of the family’ (J, F9, Newquay, 1 April 2009, 00.00–05.00). However, J‘s mother fell pregnant at the age of 16 and had been sent by her parents to a hostel for unmarried mothers in London. J then drew attention to the gold ring on her finger and continued as follows:

This little ring that I‘ve got on … was my mother‘s … When my mum was at this home for unmarried mothers in South London … they all used to use a curtain ring on their wedding fingers when they went out to the shops. And my mum went to a pawnshop in Clapham, and she found this little gold ring. She could just about afford it. So she bought it, and she was feeling really proud because she was the only one of the girls, when she took her ring off, she didn‘t have a green ring from the copper. (J, 05.00–10.00)

Although the grandparents wished the baby to be adopted, J‘s mother brought her home where she was raised by her mother, aunt and grandparents. She remarked that despite the initial conflict about adoption, she was much loved by her grandfather and became ‘the apple of his eye’ (J, 10.00–15.00). Much of the subsequent autobiographical narrative, however, revolves around the absence of her father and the ongoing impact of this throughout her life. She sought out and met her father when she was 18, at a cafe in Smithfield market, hoping that he would fund her further education. But he only offered her a cheque for £25, explaining that he had four children in private education and could not afford more. She commented that she ‘always found it hurtful that he referred to his other children as “his kids” … she would have liked to feel included with his other children’ (J, 30.00–35.00). Her father came to see her when she was 43, resulting in a ‘very difficult meeting’. J remained bitter that it took so many years for him to initiate contact with her, and that a meaningful relationship never developed (J, 35.00–40.00).

J wore the ring, a gift from her mother, at the time of her marriage to her first husband. But the marriage ended in divorce, and a later marriage also foundered due to alcoholism and violence. The ring is therefore a material reminder of marriages that never took place and marriages that broke down. In this context, continued attachment to the ring seems difficult to understand. There is a strong dimension of ‘what if’ implicit within these stories: if her father had married her mother; if her father had shown interest in her as a child and supported her aspirations as she grew older; if her own marriages had endured. The ring, therefore, may represent an alternative imagined family trajectory over two generations. The absence of nurturing and protective stable marriages, the cultural ideal symbolized by the wedding ring, is the unifying narrative peripeteia in this family story.

Both a house and a wedding ring signify economic and emotional security and social status. To draw upon Gillis’ typology, they represent the family we live ‘by’. The performative cultural agency of the house and the wedding ring, therefore, conflict with the remembered family experience. The stories about the house and the ring appear to do three things. They enable the narrators to unconsciously reflect the tension between the ideal and the real in family memory, identify causal factors to explain aspects of the family’s present that contrast with the remembered stability and wealth of the family in the past, and provide the opportunity for counterfactual thinking and implicit imaginative reconstruction of alternative family trajectories and identities.

A horseshoe

Not all significant family things were bequeathed (or not bequeathed) to subsequent generations. The following story demonstrates that a thing with mnemonic meaning for the family’s past can be ‘found’. X was born during the Second World War to a naval family in Southampton. Both his parents died comparatively young in their mid-50s, and he thought he came from a ‘long line of Kentish seamen’ (X, F2, Perranporth, 13 January 2009, 10.00–15.00). But a phrase of his father’s had stuck in his mind and in 1998, after taking voluntary redundancy from his skilled technical position with a large British company, he began research into the family history. The trigger was his father’s comment that the family ‘had all four bloods in us’ (X, 10.00–15.00). Later X was to realize this meant English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestry: ‘I started because I wanted to see where I actually came from … I become fascinated with it all. By then I had lost … lost all my parents, just had a few aunts left, nothing on my Dad’s side’ (X, 45.00–50.00).

After extensive research in the census, local newspapers, early nineteenth-century parish records, wills and other sources, X established that in fact his paternal ancestors were rural labourers, molecatchers and crofters in Ayrshire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has tracked their descendants’ movements down to the south of England, as well as overseas. The discovery of Scots ancestry was very important to him. He had visited the sites of the crofts and the family graves in the village and planned future excursions north to further his research into the seasonal rhythm of crofting working lives and family history. This knowledge about his ancestry initially, however, took him aback:

It is hard to imagine I come from that frankly. Why? It just was, I just couldn’t believe it. If we all go far enough back we all come from agricultural labourers somewhere, yes we did. When I started I didn’t imagine that. What did you imagine when you started? Because my Dad was involved with wireless and telegraphy, I forgot that wasn’t always there, and his father was naval as well, I expected a long line of seamen and ended up with a long line of Scottish farmers. I’m not upset, just that I’ve been cheering for the wrong football team all these years … I’ve got to like the idea now that I’ve got a lot of Scottish blood in me, as well as the Welsh and everything else, I’m quite happy to be a complete mixture …’ (X, 1.00.00–1.05.00)

When asked about family objects later in the interview, X briefly mentioned his father’s boxing trophies and naval slope and then described a horseshoe from one of the farms in Scotland:

Outside, from one of the farms in Scotland, I’ve got a horseshoe which they reckon is related to the horses which my family used to plough the fields up there; always digging up these big horseshoes, they must have been Shire horses, very big yes. Did you get that when you went up? Yes, I got that in Scotland and brought that back down. I meant to have it buffed up and made nice, bright silver and hang it up somewhere as a lucky horseshoe, but it’s still out there waiting to be done. I must get someone who’s got a grinder to try and smooth it up. Yeah, I’ve got the horseshoe. (X, 1.10.00–1.15.00)

In this family narrative, the lives of earlier generations in Scotland, symbolized in the horseshoe from the farm in Ayrshire, carry much more weight in terms of identity than the places and occupations of other strands of the family tree (some of which extend further back in Cumbria, Wales or Ireland) or the lives of more recent generations. This attachment to a Scots identity is reflected in other stories that connect his family forebears to the epic poem of Tam o’Shanter by Robert Burns and a personal website accompanied by bagpipes (X, 20.00–25.00). Identity, in this context, contains a powerful imaginary dimension, which also contains implicit counterfactual thinking. The peripeteia in this family narrative is located in the decision of the paternal grandfather to leave Scotland as a young man, after a religious dispute with his father, and join the navy. Beneath X’s desire to re-establish his Scottish origins lies an unspoken counterfactual narrative, one of a settled, culturally empowering identity located in place rather than the unsettled, peripatetic family identity that he inherited. He commented that in contrast to his Scottish ancestors, other branches of his ancestry and indeed he himself had been comparatively ‘itinerant’ and were/would be difficult to track over time through the census (X, 1.10.00–1.15.00). X’s paternal grandfather’s departure precipitated a cultural and geographical rupture that X has painstakingly reconstituted through his detailed genealogical research and symbolized in the ‘lucky horseshoe’.

A bottle of shells

The final family story moves to the other end of Britain to Cornwall. This significant thing does not fit the widely accepted definition of material culture with which we began. In the story that follows, it is things from the natural world that have acquired mnemonic significance. This family has a strong Cornish identity: in the nineteenth century, the maternal grandparents were gardeners on a local aristocratic estate, while the paternal side were seafarers living in the small coastal village of Portscatho on the Roseland Peninsula. Born in 1937, Grandmother U’s family narrative placed significant emphasis upon an event of the mid-nineteenth century, when her seafaring great grandfather died unexpectedly:

But Great Grandfather L, he died in the flu epidemic in London, and the ship had to be sold [a hundred ton three-masted schooner] and all the debts paid. Then, of course, Great Grandma, she had to come into town; she came into Walsingham Place, and of course no help in those days, and she started a milliners and dressmaking business because she had four children. (U, F3, Truro, 2 February 2009, 05.00–10.00)

Sarah and Caroline, the two eldest girls in the family, collected a bottle of shells from Portscatho beach ‘the day before they came into town’, which has been passed down across the generations from mother to daughter (U, 05.00–10.00).

The story of Sarah, U’s grandmother, is picked up a little later in the interview. The eldest of the four children, she was sent into service when she was 9 years of age. During the interview, U spent some time describing the physical hardships of Sarah’s life, both in service and when married (U, 15.00–20.00, 30.00–35.00, 1.05.00–1.10.00). The bottle of shells resonates in memory for grandmother and granddaughter. For sisters Sarah and Caroline, the shells were surely a connection to their childhood home, and perhaps a happier, more secure existence before the death of their father. Both these meanings may be heard in the stories about the hardship in Grandma Sarah’s life. For U, the shells also symbolize a sense of place and her Cornish origins, as well as the unexpected event that changed the course of her grandmother’s life and that of her descendants. The shells therefore represent a narrative ‘peripeteia’, but they too carry echoes of counterfactual memory. What if the great grandfather had not died? Would the family have remained in their home in Portscatho, in more secure economic circumstances, resulting in a very different life for Grandma Sarah and her descendants?

Conclusion

While many inherited family objects may attract minimal emotional investment or appear to play little role in identity formation, this research project suggests that there is a category of things that are central to the family narrative and personal identity. The eldest generation from four families identified things that clearly symbolized the family trajectory over three or more generations. While two of the four things, the house and the wedding ring, exercise performative agency in terms of their cultural meaning, the dialectical relationship between memory and thing for all four could only be fully understood in the context of the oral history narrative.

The role of these objects in the family narratives challenges aspects of contemporary conclusions relating to the relationship between family, objects and memory. First, analysts have emphasized the functional role of objects in commemorating the positive dimensions of family life, celebrating the times when relationships within the family were at their most ideal. Yet these four things clearly identify the opposite in family memory: the moment or moments when the family fragmented or became economically or socially vulnerable. This dimension of our research also conflicts with aspects of contemporary theorisation concerning the function of oral stories about the past. These stories, it has been argued, seek to align past identities with present-day selves, creating a discursive continuity between past and present (Thomson, 1994; Zerubavel, 2003). As Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) concluded, objects can be portable ‘mnemonic bridges’ that facilitate

The discursive production of a continuous biography [which] consists of playing up those elements of our past that are consistent with (or can somehow be constructed as prefiguring) our present identity while downplaying those that are incongruous with it. (p. 53)

This process of mnemonic alignment appears to fit the story about the horseshoe, where an adopted Scottish identity has elided other strands of family ancestry and two generations of family life in England. It is an example of what Zerubavel calls ‘the special mnemonic status of beginnings’ (Zerubavel, p. 101). But even so, the metaphor of the bridge of necessity entails traversing or navigating a fissure or obstruction, and all four narratives about the house, ring, horseshoe and bottle of shells draw attention to rupture rather than continuity between past and present. Why do individuals keep, reference, or pass on things that appear to represent discontinuity rather than continuity?

These objects generate stories with an explanatory or causal dimension, where the actions or premature mortality of forebears has led to the perception of unsettled or adverse outcomes for descendants. This suggests that personal identity can include awareness of what has been irreversibly lost by past family generations, leading to the strong implicit or explicit dimension of counterfactual thinking in both family memory and personal identity formation. Cognitive scientists argue that dipping into alternative scenarios and utilizing memory to imagine alternative realities is a habit ‘core to the human experience’ (De Brigard, 2015: 28–35; Wallis, 2015: 1). They suggest that the impact of counterfactual thinking, particularly in the context of specific memories, may fulfil a number of functions: ‘imagination not only helps us plan for a better future and ease the burden of our personal past. It may also help our memory preserve those emotions we most want to keep’ (De Brigard, 2015: 35). The burden that is most significantly eased by counterfactual thinking in these four stories, however, is the conflict between present-day circumstances and normative social discourses.

The stories about things emerged most strongly in contemporary family contexts of economic disadvantage, emotional instability or geographical transience, all of which conflict with contemporary value-laden public discourses around home ownership, stable families and cultural identities. The lost house, wedding ring, horseshoe and bottle of shells may each function as a private talisman or symbol of personal and family identity and status that is derived not from the present but from memory or genealogical knowledge of past generations. Family memory, therefore, can include a material dimension in the form of things that symbolize a narrative peripeteia. Counterfactual thinking, in this context, enables individuals to hold on to a cherished sense of self-worth in the face of family adversity or instability by grounding their personal identity in family circumstances prior to the pivotal event.