Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, family history is the place where two great oceans of research are meeting: family historians outside the academy with traditionally trained, often university-employed historians. This collection is both a testament to dialogue and an analysis of the dynamics of recent family history that derives from the confluence of professional historians with family historians, their common causes, and conversations. It brings together leading and emerging Australian and New Zealand scholars to consider the relationship between family history and the discipline of history and the potential of family history to extend the scope of historical enquiry, even to revitalise the discipline. In Anglo-Western culture, the roots of the disciplines professionalisation lay in efforts to reconstruct history as objective knowledge, to extend its subject matter, and to enlarge the scale of historical enquiry. Family history, almost by definition, is often inescapably personal and localised. How then have historians responded to this resurgence of interest in the personal and the local and how has it influenced the thought and practice of historical enquiry?
Malcolm Allbrook is Research Fellow at the National Centre of Biography, and Managing Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in the School of History, Australian National University.
Sophie Scott-Brown is Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, UK.
Routledge Approaches to History
5History in a Post-Truth World
Theory and Praxis
Edited by Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones
6The Primacy of Method in Historical Research
Philosophy of History and the Perspective of Meaning
Jonas Ahlskog
7Archives and Human Rights
Edited by Jens Boel, Perrine Canavaggio and Antonio Gonzlez Quintana
8Historical Experience
Essays on the Phenomenology of History
David Carr
9Humanism: Foundations, Diversities, Developments
Jrn Rsen
10National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century
A Global Comparison
Edited by Niels F. May and Thomas Maissen
11Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand
Related Histories
Edited by Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown
12Writing Russia
The Discursive Construction of AnOther Nation
Melissa-Ellen Dowling
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Approaches-to-History/book-series/RSHISTHRY
Family History and Historians in Australia and New Zealand
Related Histories
Edited by Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown
First published 2021
by Routledge
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2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-40398-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-02329-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35589-9 (ebk)
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Contents
PART I
Family, History, Historians
Malcolm Allbrook and Sophie Scott-Brown
Alan Atkinson
Nicholas Dean Brodie
Melanie Nolan
Ashley Barnwell
PART II
Critical Historiography
Anna Clark
Jane McCabe
Cathy Day
Matthew Stallard and Jerome de Groot
PART III
Teaching and Learning Family History
Emma Shaw
Kristyn Harman
Tanya Evans
Everybody loves a wedding. It is the crowning ritual of domestic life, the joining of two families and the beginning of a new one. This book celebrates a prospective marriage, the cordial partnership between family historians and academic historians. Considering their intellectual pedigrees, it may seem an unlikely match. Their relationship was long beset by feelings of condescension and neglect. Recently, however, mutual interests, social proximity, and sentimental attraction have drawn them closer. Academics and family historians share an interest in the revolutionary research potential of online genealogical databases. Increasingly they cross paths on online networks of exchange and collaboration. And almost unaware of each other, they have become fellow travellers towards a common goal: the search for personal and group identity that is now one of the defining characteristics of our increasingly connected yet restless and often rootless world.
In November 2017 genealogists, academic and family historians, and librarians met at a national conference, Related Histories: Studying the Family, at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. A long-time academic observer of family history, I had recently crossed over to become a family historian myself.1 In writing Lost Relations (2015), the story of my mothers family, the Hewetts, in England and colonial Australia, I came to see the relationship between family history and academic history in a new light.2 I found myself using traditional sources in a different way, viewing familiar historical events from a more intimate angle, thinking in a different interpretative frame and writing in a voice that acknowledged more openly the tensions between my personal and professional lives. I came to Canberra eager to celebrate the union but also with questions about its future prospects. How had it come about? What was the common ground and where were the potential sources of tension? How might the partnership develop in future?
Two centuries ago, genealogy was an exclusive pursuit, one of the props of gentility. Remember Sir Walter Elliott, father of the heroine in Jane Austens Persuasion, who never took up any book but the Baronetage? In its pages, Austen relates, he could read his own history with an interest that never failed, his faculties aroused to admiration and respect. Admiration and respect for ones family tree, combined with pity and contempt for inferior twigs and branches, was the foundation of a society based on hereditary rights.3 Yet, genealogy flourished in democratic Australia almost as much as in aristocratic England. Its popularity suggests [a] desire to maintain ones links and roots, to preserve ones identity of background and inheritance as much cultural as familial, historian Paul de Serville observes. Victorias landed upper class aspired to become a gentry with its own arms, pedigrees, and versions of the Baronetage, like
