The Emotions of Family History

Family history links the past to the present in powerful ways, as producers of the phenomenally popular global television series Who do you think you are? have revealed (Evans 2015, De Groot 2015). Over the last five years I have written about the practice and politics of family history in Australia based on research using the collections of the State Library of New South Wales and interviews with family historians. I have undertaken collaborative research with different genealogical communities in Australia, including the Society of Australian Genealogists and descendants of clients of The Benevolent Society (Australia’s oldest surviving charity), to show the ways in which Australian history has been transformed by the contributions of family historians and the emotional impact of that knowledge on family historians themselves. All sorts of assumptions are made about family historians but my research with genealogical communities in Australia, England and Canada aims to trouble these and to work at ways of collaborating with them. There was a time, when genealogists were coded in particular ways – middle-aged, bespectacled, middle-class and usually female. This paper will question the gendering of family history, reveal the links between feminism and family history and show the complex ways in which family historians evoke emotions when talking about their motivations and the impact of their research on their lives. Does family history have different emotional consequences in varied national contexts and what are the social and political consequences of these emotional encounters with the past?