Genealogy, Volume 5, Issue 4 (December 2021) – 23 articles

The scope of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how Bangladeshi migrants in Italy maintain transnational family attachments, across multiple destinations, with the home country as well as with several host countries. The data comes from fieldwork in Northeast Italy. Research methods include in-depth interviews and participant observation. The findings reveal that a high proportion of Bangladeshi migrants maintain a variety of transnational and diasporic ties with their family and friends living in the country of origin and different European countries. These include family obligations, remittances, establishing businesses back home, visits and communication. They also preserve their national identity in this host society by maintaining cultural ways of belonging and through religious practices and involvement in Bangladeshi politics. The findings have also shown that Italian Bangladeshi families work to foster transnational family ties among the new generations born in Italy, who have little knowledge of their ancestral country. On a final note, this paper argues that transnational connections with the homeland play an important role in shaping the diasporic lives of Bangladeshis in Italy. Full article

This paper reviews what we know about the experiences of adopted people who discover in later-life that they are adopted. It begins by discussing how and why various facets of the adoption experience have come to the fore over the 20th and 21st century time span of contemporary adoption. The paper concludes with the fact that research on the late discovery of adoption is in its infancy. It also points to parallels that will exist for people who have been conceived by anonymous donation and raises additional areas for possible research. Full article

The thesis of the article is that taking a social network approach to genealogical problems of origin and parentage can, where applicable, result in two noteworthy benefits. The first benefit is that it may more quickly and effectively lead to matrilateral kin by helping to reconstruct a kinship network. The second benefit is that it will lead to a deeper understanding of social circles in which a husband and/or wife participate. This approach turns the usual genealogical practice of unravelling a female’s position in a cluster in relation to her husband on its head—the male’s position in a social network is reconstructed by backtracking one of his significant females (wife, mother, or sister). As background, the article briefly discusses networks, the importance of women as connectors in kinship networks, and cultural practices of kinship, in this case, eighteenth-century Germany/United States. It then presents a case study of Catharine Minnich, a Pennsylvania woman of German descent. In addition to analyzing relations by blood and marriage, it recognizes the important role of baptismal sponsors in aligning a multi-family network. Full article

This narrative essay offers an exploration of the power and importance of family origin stories as a grounding aspect of collective and individual identity for Black people. The author, drawing on his experience as a Black queer contemplative scholar and college professor, gives attention to the question of whether the truth is necessary or beneficial in the creation of family narratives and what each successive generation is allowed to know. This question is explored through the story of the unintended positive and negative consequences the author experienced as a result of submitting DNA to Ancestry.com. Full article

Family history has become a significant contributor to public and social histories exploring and (re)discovering the micro narratives of the past. Due to the growing democratisation of digital access to documents and the proliferation of family history media platforms, family history is now challenging traditional custodianship of the past. Family history research has moved beyond the realms of archives, libraries and community-based history societies to occupy an important space in the public domain. This paper reports on some of the findings of a recent study into the historical thinking and research practices of Australian family historians. Using a case study methodology, it examines the proposition that researching family history has major impacts on historical understanding and consciousness using the analytic frameworks of Jorn Rüsen’s Disciplinary Matrix and his Typology of Historical Consciousness. This research not only proposes these major impacts but argues that some family historians are shifting the historical landscape through the dissemination of their research for public consumption beyond traditional family history audiences. Full article

The British invasion of the Māori region of the Waikato in 1863 was one of the most pivotal moments in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been the subject of multiple authoritative histories and sits at the centre of historical discussions of sovereignty, colonial politics and the dire consequences of colonisation. This article approaches this complex historical moment through the personal histories of a Māori/Pākehā homestead located at the political and geographic epicentre of the invasion. This mixed whanau/family provides the opportunity to explore a more kinship-based ontology of the invisible lines of influence that influenced particular actions before and during the invasion. It does so by mobilising two genealogical approaches, one by author Hugh Campbell which explores the British/Pākehā individuals involved in this family and uses formal documentation and wider historical writing to explain key dynamics—but also to expose a particular limitation of reliance on Western ontologies and formal documentation alone to explain histories of colonisation. In parallel to this approach, the other author—William Kainana Cuthers—uses both formal/Western and a Māori/Pasifika relational ontology of enquiry, and in doing so, allows both authors to open up a set of key insights into this pivotal moment in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and into the micro-dynamics of colonisation. Full article

Tamara Hareven, as a new social historian and family historian, weaved multiple narratives together into a tapestry that represented her best approximation of truth. In this piece, I strive to do likewise as I address three topics: (a) Tamara Hareven as Family and Social Historian, (b) Tamara Hareven as Theorist, and (c) Personal Reflections on Tamara Hareven as Mentor and Friend. Full article

Marae Ora, Kainga Ora (MOKO) is a three-year research study established as a marae-led intervention project to strengthen the provision of housing with five urban marae in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. In brief, marae are primarily places for cultural gatherings and are the centres of activity for Māori communities. Though just one of the marae involved is part of a pre-European tribal settlement, the four other marae were established to meet the cultural needs of Māori who had relocated many decades ago from their tribal areas outside of the Auckland region. The project works with Marae Research Coordinators (MRC) nominated by each marae to build research and development capacity and capability through the sharing of skills, information, and resources. Each MRC is affiliated with their respective marae, either through whakapapa (genealogical links) or through their contributions of service and leadership. The role of the MRC is critical in capturing the lived realities, experiences, and aspirations of their marae community. This was evident in the first year of the project (2020) when three of the five marae actively responded to the needs of their communities during COVID-19 lockdowns in Auckland. While the project has a housing focus, the marae involved demonstrate, in their own distinctive ways, how health and wellbeing is intrinsic to their core function. Full article

Although biological relationships are a universal reality for all human beings, the concepts of “family” and “family bond” depend on both the geographic region and the historical moment to which they refer. However, the concept of “family” can be determinant in a large variety of societies, since it can influence the lines of succession, inheritances and social relationships, as well as where and with whom an individual is buried. The relation between a deceased person and other members of a community, other individuals of the same necropolis, or even with those who are buried in the same tomb can be analysed from the genetic point of view, considering different perspectives: archaeological, historical, and forensic. In the present work, the concepts of “family” and “kinship” are discussed, explaining the relevance of genetic analysis, such as nuclear and lineage markers, and their contribution to genealogical research, for example in the heritage of surnames and Y-chromosome, as well as those cases where some discrepancies with historical record are detected, such as cases of adoption. Finally, we explain how genetic genealogical analyses can help to solve some cold cases, through the analysis of biologically related relatives. Full article

In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States. Full article

In North America, Indigenous pasts are publicly understood through narratives constructed by archaeologists who bring Western ideologies to bear on their inquiries. The resulting Eurocentric presentations of Indigenous pasts shape public perceptions of Indigenous peoples and influence Indigenous perceptions of self and of archaeology. In this paper we confront Eurocentric narratives of Indigenous pasts, specifically Wabanaki pasts, by centering an archaeological story on relationality between contemporary and past Indigenous peoples. We focus on legacy archaeological collections and eroding heritage sites in Acadia National Park, Maine. We present the “Red Paint People” myth as an example of how Indigenous pasts become distorted through archaeological narratives influenced by Western ideologies and offer a framework for indigenizing archaeological narratives constructed previously through Western lenses, using Indigenous language and community engagement to carry out the study. Full article

As Diné, we must understand the traditional teachings that were once in place through oral traditions and teachings. There are many troubles Diné (Navajo) women and Nadleeh (Two-Spirit) people face from outside the community, but due to western influence, we endure the same effects from within our own Nation. Through this paper, I aim to propose resolutions to move our Nation in the right direction for social change and build a community of acceptance by reaching back to traditional teaching philosophies without the influence of cis-heteronormative patriarchal structures. I argue that adoptions of these western institutions have severe effects on Diné women and Nadleeh (Two-Spirit) livelihood and well-being. In this paper, I examine three areas of Diné philosophy and cosmology: (1) the central role of K’é (family) and the matrilineal clanship, (2) Diné women and Nadleeh voices in our creation stories, and (3) Hozhó, the beauty way, to understand the masculine and feminine energies of Diné cosmology in order to address the importance of women and Nadleeh on Dinétah. Full article

Every European country now has some distinctive heraldic conventions and traditions embodied in the designs and artistic representations of the emblems forming part of its national corpus. This paper deals with these matters in the period from independence in 1991 to the recent change of name in 2019. It deals with the successive designs proposed for the emblem of the state itself, some of which conformed to international heraldic conventions closely enough to be called “arms” or “coats of arms”, not including the emblem adopted in 2009. Special attention is given to the distinctive conventions created for municipal heraldry, including its novel legal framework, as well as those governing personal heraldry developed in the twenty-first century. The paper examines the evolution of heraldic thought and practice in Macedonia in the three decades in question, especially in the context of the Macedonian Heraldic Society and its journal, The Macedonian Herald, and its Register of Arms and the Civic Heraldic System it created. Full article

The “everyday bordering” concept has provided key insights into the effects of diverse bordering practices upon social life, placing the bordering of the welfare state among wider state interventions in an autochthonous politics of belonging. Sociological contributions have also introduced new explanations as to why states pursue such measures, positing that neoliberal states seek legitimacy through increasing activities to (re)affirm borders within this politics of belonging, compensating for a failure to govern the economy in the interests of citizens. To what extent is this visible in the state-led emergence of (everyday) borders around welfare in the United Kingdom, often cited as a key national case? This article draws from 20 elite interviews to contribute to genealogical accounts of the emergence of everyday bordering through identifying the developing “problematizations” connected to this kind of bordering activity, as the British state began to distinctly involve welfare-state actors in bordering policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. This evidence underlines how these policies were tied to a “pull factor” problematization of control failure, where the state needed to reduce various “pull factors” purportedly attracting unwanted migrants in order to control immigration per se, with little evidence that legitimacy issues tied to perceived declining economic governability informed these developments in this period. These findings can inform future genealogical analyses that trace the emergence of everyday bordering. Full article

The article develops the view of transnational familyhood as an affect of precarity. Transnationality itself is viewed as being defined by state actors and border regimes which make transnational connections fragile and vulnerable. The precarity is compared here with “the lease that is not in your pocket”. The text assembles the authors’ ethnographic work in Finnish-Russian border areas from two decades. Using the methodology of narrative ethnography, the study creates a picture of the atmosphere and affects in which transnational familyhood has been kept alive from the early 1920s until today. The historical context of transnational familyhood is divided into four periods: the period of confrontation and wars, 1920s–1940s; the period of friendly cooperation and a selectively open border, 1950s–1980s; the post-Soviet period of a conditionally open border and migration, 1990s–2010s; and the post-Crimean period of rebordering and the securitization of the transnational everyday since 2014. The everyday reality of transnational familyhood is portrayed through the constructed figures of “Aili” and “Vera”, who represent women belonging to transnational families from different generations. Full article

A growing body of scholarship addresses what Indigenous peoples have always known: stories are critically important to who we are and how to be in the world. For Wounaan, an Indigenous people of Panama and Colombia, ancestors’ stories are no longer frequently told. As part of the Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam (National Wounaan Congress) and Foundation for the Development of Wounaan People’s project on bird guiding, birds and culture, and forest restoration in Panama, we leveraged the publication requirement as political intervention and anticolonial practice in storying worlds. This article is the story of our storying, the telling and crafting of an illustrated story book that honors Wounaan convivial lifeworlds, Wounaan chaain döhigaau nemchaain hoo wënʌʌrrajim/Los niños wounaan, en sus aventuras vieron muchas aves/The Adventures of Wounaan Children and Many Birds. Here, we have used video conference minutes and recordings, voice and text messages, emails, recollections, and a conference co-presentation to show stories as Indigenous method and reality, as epistemological and ontological. We use a narrative form to weave together our collaborative process and polish the many storying decisions on relationality, time, egalitarianism, movement, rivers, embodiment, and verbal poetics through an everyday adventure of siblings and birds. Available as a multimodal illustrated story book in digital audio and print, we conclude by advocating for new media to further storying Indigenous lifeworlds. Full article

This paper explores the ways in which ancestor research has become a replacement for religious community and practice in a post-religious world. We explore the parallels of popular present-day family history pursuits with traditional religious practices, noting the similarities in how the practices are used to foster and strengthen feelings of identity, purpose, and belonging. We look at three particular customs that are common to those interested in ancestor research: the handing on of ‘sacred’ stories and objects with familial significance; acts of pilgrimage to ancestrally significant places; and engaging in ‘ritual’ gatherings, either with extended family or with others who share the interest of ancestor research. Full article

Indigenous ways of knowing and being are invested in creating and maintaining relationships, respectful and equitable exchange, and collective but particularistic knowledges that are practical, useful, and helpful in extending meaning-making within communities. In this paper, we describe the ways that university faculty and tribal citizens come together to build meaningful relations through storytelling and counter-mapping. Focusing on what is currently known as Virginia (and the surrounding regions more broadly), the project aims to center Indigenous-created accounts of places and spaces as being infused with stories, memories, and life to reveal living histories layered into the fabric of these lands and waters. This paper details the careful, enjoyable, and challenging-at-times processes of relation-building between a university and local tribal citizens (which continues to take shape) for this project to become the Indigenous Virginia Digital Storytelling Project. Full article

This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated with the hooves of cattle, the flight of emus, and the stare of a goanna. I find myself in uncomfortable territory, complicit in the actions of my settler relatives in this region of Central Queensland, but to not examine this informal archive of possession feels like a lie. The stories that shape me begin with the tales of Mum’s foster-mother, my great-aunt, about the dreadful murderous harms done during the early settler occupation of Jiman Country. My family’s later deployment of this stolen land is a related act of war. I see a related mode of violence in tales of terrified cattle in nearby Wulli Wulli Country, Mum’s girl-self perched on the back of a weary horse, whip in her hand. In all this, there is me, telling tales, like settler writers before me, caught in the writing act, exposed as a fence, dealing in stolen goods, part of the ongoing posts of making up and wires of making do. Nonetheless, I take up my extractive blade, sharpened by a field trip to this region, and carve into my family history, with its legacy of generational violence to humans, cows, waterways, and earth, exposing three extractions: the near-genocidal murders of the Jiman and Wulli Wulli people; the ongoing slaughter of cattle; and finally, there, on the kill floor, entrails exposed, the stories of my mother, laid bare for this critical reading. Full article

In 2000, I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, a non-fiction exploration of my own family’s involvement in North American colonialism from the 1600s to the present. This personal essay reflects on the context, genesis, process, and consequences of writing this book during a decade of intense ferment in Indigenous–settler relations in Canada amid the revelations of horrific abuse at residential schools and the discovery that my highly respected grandfather had been involved with one. Considering the book from the perspective of 2021, I consider the strengths and limitations of this kind of critical family history and the degree to which public discourses and academic discussion of Canada’s history and settler complicity in colonialism have changed since the book was published. Arguing that critical reflection on family history is still an essential part of unlearning colonial attitudes and recognizing the systemic and structural ways that colonial disparities and processes are embedded in settler societies, I share a critical family history assignment that has been an essential and transformative pedagogical element in my university teaching for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Full article

Structural open adoption has been beneficial to adoptees in integrating their birth heritage and identity. Adoptive parents also may sometimes seek out others who are neither related biologically nor through partnership to support their child in developing an integrated sense of identity. To what extent do these intentional kinship relationships become incorporated within the adoptive family network and how do adoptive parents view their role in their child’s life? Qualitative data on family inclusion of non-biological and non-affinal kin are reported from interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual adoptive parents (n = 25 families). Analyses of verbal and visual data from family map drawing interviews indicated that adoptive parents from the different types of families similarly included intentional kin in their conceptualization of their child’s family. Adopted children’s foster carers, family friends, other adoptive families, and other children and adults were specifically included on family maps to facilitate children’s knowledge of different aspects of their birth heritage and adoption story. The implications of open adoption policy therefore move beyond considerations of only birth family contact. In practice, open adoption procedures convey a broad message to families that appear to widen adoptive parents’ conceptualization of kinship. Full article

This article offers a conceptual framework on Indigenous storying ethics, storying methods, storying as ruptures and storying interventions, to distinguish elements, premises and practices distinctive to Indigenous storying. This conceptual framework is built from (in)formal relational storying experiences and more structured data from over twenty years of qualitative, ethnographic, and storying projects. In its departure from expected Western methodological approaches to collecting and reporting data, it lives in Indigenous truths and epistemologies in our responsibilities and in our grounding. The interplay between ethics, methods, ruptures and interventions illustrates and centers storying as it speaks of the epistemological power of storying from ancient and traditional nature-based immersions. Full article