Genealogy, Volume 6, Issue 3 (September 2022) – 20 articles

The political changes in Bulgaria of November 1989 related to the fall of the totalitarian regime and the democratization of the country were accompanied by a severe economic crisis, a high level of unemployment and the rise of strong social inequality, which led to intensive migratory processes. The opening of the borders was followed by various forms of cross-border and transnational mobility affecting a significant part of the Bulgarian population. Since the very beginning of the 1990s, the Karakachans, due to the protectionist Greek policy with regards to them, as opposed to that regarding other Bulgarian citizens, acquired easy access to Greece visas. This enabled labor mobility which in only a few years spread across a significant number of the members of this community. For most of them, labor mobility turned out to be more than just a supplementary opportunity; it became a main strategy for realization in life. A direct result of the Karakachani’s labor mobility is periodic family separation for a certain time, which causes particular transformations in their social structures, and hence in the family life of labor migrants. It is this relationship between labor mobility and their life as lived, and its direct consequences on the family, that is the focus of the present study. Full article

Spousal separation and abandonment was prevalent through the medieval and early modern worlds. However, women experienced the traumatic and damaging consequences of these separations far more often than their male counterparts. These instances were only multiplied by the political and social upheaval caused by the Reformation. This article explores this experience for women in the early modern era using Olympia Morata, among others, as windows through which to explore the reasons women were frequently abandoned, the lived reality of experiencing this separation, and the complex religious dynamics of early modern mobility as they related to gender. Full article

Multiracial students grapple with experiences around mixedness which can hinder their sense of belonging among different social groups. Constantly feeling unaccepted and receiving the comment “You are too Black” or “You are too White” capture some of the common microaggressions faced by Black/White multiracial students. Using a phenomenological design, this study examines the ways in which Black/White multiracial students develop their sense of belonging at a predominantly White institution (PWI). While codeswitching has the ability to impact the sense of belonging in racial and ethnic minority groups, our study findings suggest that Black/White multiracial students tend to rely on chronic codeswitching as ways of seeking acceptance, balancing “otherness” and carefully minimizing exclusion when interacting with members of different social groups. Chronic codeswitching is particularly relevant as an everyday strategy in how Black/White multiracial students foster their sense of belonging and a sense of community. Research and practice implications are included. Full article

Between 1945 and 1955, Austria, like Germany, was divided into four zones under the control of the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Britain, and France. This article discusses marriages between British “occupiers” and Austrian “occupied” between 1945 and 1955, examining the policies for contact from the enactment of the non-fraternisation order until the lifting of the marriage ban. It shows how marriages were concluded despite bureaucratic and legal obstacles and discusses the experiences of Austrian “war brides” upon their arrival and settlement in Britain. The analysis draws upon a wide range of documents to survey the response of the British government and military authorities to British–Austrian relationships and marriage applications. Case studies of an Austrian war bride and children of married British–Austrian couples represent the links between state and military intervention and individual experiences set off by the presence of Allied soldiers in Austria during the first decade after the end of World War II. Full article

This study introduces a comparative framework to understand patriarchal genealogies and technologies, with reference to an anthropological commentary concerning the broader forms of coloniality of power between dominant male and dominated female bodies in Greece, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. It argues that the patterns of patrilineality, practices and representations of male honor, and female exclusion from the native family are literally and symbolically feeding on the matrix of patriarchal coloniality in the regions. The analysis is based on representative ethnographic research and historical approaches. Patrilineal kin structures, customs of captivity (i.e., bride kidnapping, sworn virgins, and honor crimes), and generalized practices of young virgin exogamy seem responsible for women’s minor status in the social stratification. Traditional hierarchies and modern social inequalities seem to motivate dispositions and regulate behaviors for female, minor, subordinate, and dispossessed bodies, as well as dominant male protectors and patriarchs. The text adopts a postcolonial and decolonial black feminist critique. It argues that in a longue durée process, a palimpsest pattern of patriarchy emerges, made upon the habitus of gendered ideology. Shaped by patriarchalism, paternalism, and patronage, patriarchy motivates a generalized pattern of coloniality within post-Ottoman geographies, thus regulating multiple material and symbolic inequalities, and even multiplying antagonistic hierarchies among family units, communities, central nation/state, periphery, and borders. Full article

This article seeks to recover the financial rights of separated women living in the Muslim communities of Russia’s Volga-Ural region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that by the 1780s–1820s, separated Muslim women were guaranteed certain rights and powers over their marital finances and personal property. These rights emerged out of a complex plural legal landscape created by the Volga-Ural region’s complicated religious and political history in the late medieval and early modern periods. By the end of the eighteenth century, separated Muslim women could claim certain financial rights under both Islamic law and Russian civil law, but had to pursue different kinds of claims through different legal systems. The legal landscape and practices that evolved in relation to separated women’s rights during the early modern period became formalized and institutionalized in the nineteenth century and persisted until the collapse of the Russian empire. Full article

This paper analyses the adoption of mixed-race children in Great Britain from formerly colonised or dominion territories after the Second World War with a focus on the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the ways in which mixed-race children and their biological, as well as their adoptive families, were treated in the adoption system in order to explore the tensions that arise between adoption and questions of racial belonging. As adoption and its related processes have the ability to profoundly interfere with the most private realms of human cohabitation—the family, this positions the history of adoption right at the interface of the private and the public sphere, offering an ideal background to look at the public as well as the private perception of the (decolonising) British Empire. By taking this specific group of children into focus, it is possible to illustrate the immediate and deeper effect of the race/colour question in adoptions as if under a magnifying glass. In the context of adoption processes, deeply colonial and inherently racist patterns of thought can be found, particularly in adoption records, but also in advice literature. Full article

This Special Issue of Genealogy examines the use of evidence, documentation, and methodology in family history and genealogical studies, and welcomes case studies that examine how to document individuals and relationships. A critical component of scholarly research focusing on the study of particular individuals or groups entails correctly identifying those individuals Historians, genealogists, historical demographers, and scholars in other disciplines sometimes undertake this sort of analysis. Often, research is uncomplicated if the research subject remained in a particular geographical area, or left a clear evidentiary trail, but what happens when historical documents do not clearly identify the research subject? Utilizing a case study approach, this essay employs four different research methods—the chronological study, family reconstitution, community study techniques, and the one-name study—to identify an individual whose correct historical identification was problematic. As such, it establishes a research strategy that can be employed in similar situations. Full article

This paper explores the manners in which Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous researchers, medical directors, and knowledge-keepers (among others) extend the ethical precepts and social justice commitments that are inherent in community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to genomics. By means of a genealogical analysis of bioethical discourses, I examine the problem in which genomic science claims to offer potentially beneficial genetic screening tools to Indigenous and racialized peoples who have and continue to struggle with historical health inequity, exploitation, and exclusion by the very biomedical institutions which would be charged with the task of ethically introducing these biomedical tools. This investigation focuses on Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) as an approach established by Indigenous communities and scientists to gain access to the benefits of genomic health which, if the field’s promises are true, aims to counter the historical neglect or exploitation by biomedical researchers and institutions. I chart the role of CBPR principals as it pertains to collective efforts by both Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous allies to create the social, biomedical, and institutional conditions to improve Indigenous health equity in the context of genomic science in two specific studies: the Silent Genome initiative (British Columbia) and the Aotearoa Variome (Aotearoa/New Zealand). This investigation contributes insights to social science literatures in health equity for racialized communities, biomedical ethics, Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, and decolonial biomedical and technoscience histories. Full article

Family genealogy is well-positioned to explore the significance of burial and death, particularly as it relates to one’s connection to ancestors. Doing genealogical research involves visiting the land of the dead, treasuring information, heirlooms, and documents providing evidence about the life of an ancestor, and often revealing a presence of and interaction with the ancestor. Burial is not only associated with the essence of humanity, and coeval with historical consciousness, but it is also essentially connected with genealogy. One may argue that historical consciousness is founded on awareness of and practices bearing on genealogical and ancestral relations. After briefly listing points related to burial and mortuary practices, the article discusses Western philosophers beginning with Plato to show the dual emphases of concern for personal mortality and death of the other. It focuses on death of the other as being able to explain funerary practices and as amenable to genealogy. Next, a brief examination of Freud’s uncanny and of Abraham and Torok’s transgenerational psychology constructed on evidence of the unconscious phantom lead to the spectral turn instituted by Derrida. The article is rounded out with a consideration of the metatextuality of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey epics. Both involve a visit by the living to the land of the dead. Both are textual, placing unwritten stress on the critical role of writing. Full article

The article is an ethnographic account of recent and contemporary narratives and practices of care and aging in Croatia in the pre-pandemic and COVID-19 pandemic period, within the framework of formal, informal, and “hybrid” systems of care. Its theoretical basis lies in the fields of the anthropology of family, and the anthropology of aging and care, as well as in the concepts of dignity and the conceptions of futures. The ethnographic data were gathered from 2018–2021, in four locations/regions, both in rural and urban settings. The aim of the paper is to initiate a discussion about the qualitative, socio-cultural aspects of aging and everyday life of the elderly, of its transformations and continuities, both in the spatial and temporal dimension, in urban and rural contexts, in crisis, and in “times of peace”. Full article

In this article, I investigate state policies in socialist rule in Bulgaria, encouraging pensioners to work beyond retirement and their impact on eldercare. First, I argue that in the 1970s, Bulgarian pensioners began occupying economic niches similar to those of labor migrants in Western Europe. The policies actively promoting work after retirement were introduced in parallel with legislation encouraging older people to distribute their property among potential heirs as a donation instead of their last will. I argue that this combination of work beyond retirement and inheritance patterns had a negative impact on eldercare and should be taken into consideration when designing new policies addressed at working pensioners. The research is based on letters of complaint or denunciation from the 1970s, available in the Bulgarian State Archives. Full article

Multiracial college students’ enrollment has increased significantly over the past decade. This study examined the experiences of multiracial college students at a historically White institution (HWI) in the Northeast—particularly how student experiences within interracial family relationships—prior to college and while enrolled in college have assisted them in navigating instances of racism. In this exploratory qualitative study, students indicated that their family members can provide support in understanding racism. However, it does depend on the type of relationship and support (e.g., strong, weak, or stressed) they receive from specific family members during their pre-college and college experiences. Multiracial students confirmed experiencing multiracial microaggressions and found that they receive the most family support from their siblings. Implications are provided for students, practitioners, and interracial families to empower multiracial students to confront racism while attending a HWI. Full article

Based on life-history interviews and fieldwork among second-generation minority Danish parents from different ethnic backgrounds, this article explores changes in parenting norms and practices between first-generation and second-generation minority Danish parents. The second-generation parents generally experience that, compared to their own parents and contemporary first-generation parents, they have a more ‘open’ and ‘engaged’ relationship with their children and their schools, making them feel intimately shaped by Danish society. Contesting integration and governmentality approaches, the article takes an Eliasian figurational approach, illuminating the historical changes in and current characteristics of the relationship between state, school, children, and parents that shapes the Danish ‘state-school figuration’. It explores how these second-generation minorities’ entanglement in the interdependencies of this figuration—first as children and later as parents—makes it valuable and sensible for them to engage in the ‘intensive parenting’ applauded in Danish schools. Yet, due to these interdependencies, their intensive parenting involves both distancing themselves from and acting as cultural brokers for first-generation parents, as well as using their own insider knowledge to protect their children from negative influence, stigmatisation, and discrimination. Full article

This article will analyse the use of genealogy in the context of race, place, and justice via the concepts of nationality/citizenship and cultural/national identity, including “imagined communities”. Analysis is undertaken through the legal concept of “jus sanguinis” and simultaneous differing interpretations of “citizen”, including the concept of “effective nationality”. The latter incorporates the Nottebohm principle “shared sentiments and interests” and is particularly relevant in “security situations. This article argues that “effective nationality” is indicative of the Anderson’s famous landmark study of nationalism, “Imagined Communities”. The legal concept of jus sanguinis draws upon genealogy: “A line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor”. However, the imagined communities to which someone perceives they belong, through ancestral lineage, or cultural, political or religious affinity are often highly contested cultural notions, not least in times of political unrest. This article will focus on the UK and show how liberal policies and criteria initially aimed at the expansion of citizenship have, in the 21st century, similarly enabled exclusion. However, I argue that the current exclusion process is the simultaneous use of jus sanguinis and cultural interpretations of “effective nationality” when applied to those who supported proscribed groups, for example ISIS in Syria. This paper uses legislation, media comment, and the legal case studies of Nottebohm and Shamima Begum. Full article

Research on mixed heritage people has often focused on their reported race(s) and what these self-reports may reveal about their racial leanings. In the U.S., people are also asked: “What is this person’s ancestry or ethnic origin?” as a census fill-in-the-blank question. Existing research has analyzed the census data on race and ancestry and has uncovered meanings about ethnicity among White Americans, but little is known about the importance of ancestry in the case of mixed heritage people. In this paper, we draw on our interviews with 68 American-Indian-White, Black-White, and Asian-White mixed heritage people in the U.S. Given that many mixed heritage people’s connections with their disparate ancestries can be hindered by generational distance, lack of cultural contact and exposure, and social rejection, what motivates mixed heritage people to report their disparate ancestries, and how do their ancestry claims relate to their racial identities? How may the differential histories and racialization of groups in the U.S. shape mixed heritage people’s ability and inclination to assert either their White or minority ancestries? We found that mixed heritage individuals who were motivated to assert their ancestry claims did so for two main reasons: First, by claiming a specific ancestry (or ancestries), participants wished to assert a more individualistic sense of self than was typically allowed, given their racial treatment based upon their racial appearance; this could be especially meaningful if those individuals felt a mismatch between their racial assignment by others and their sense of self. Second, a claim to a specific ancestry was a way for individuals to forge connections with family, relatives, or an ancestry group that had not existed before. Overall, while most of our mixed heritage participants reported details of their European ancestries, it was their Black, American Indian, or Asian ancestries that were deemed to be most salient and/or meaningful to who they were. Full article

Developments in reproductive (e.g., assisted reproduction, surrogacy) and genetic technologies (commercial DNA ancestry testing) have opened new routes to mixedness that disrupt the relationship between multiracialism and family. Discussions of racial mixedness, both academic and lay, tend to refer to persons born to parents of different racialized ancestry. Multiracialism is also understood as an outcome of extended generational descent—a family lineage comprised of ancestors of varied “races”. Both modes of mixed subjectivity rely on a notion of race as transmitted through sexual reproduction, and our study of them has often focused on the implications of this boundary crossing for families. These routes to mixedness imply a degree of intimacy and “knownness” between partners, with implications for the broader web of relationships into which one is born or marries. Assisted reproduction allows for the intentional creation of mixed-race babies outside of sexual reproduction and relationship. These technologies make possible mixed race by design, in which one can choose an egg or sperm donor on the basis of their racial difference, without knowing the donor beyond a set of descriptive characteristics. Commercial DNA testing produces another route to mixedness—mixed by revelation—in which previously unknown mixed ancestry is revealed through genetic testing. Ancestry tests, however, deal in estimations of biogenetic markers, rather than specific persons. To varying degrees, these newer routes to mixedness reconfigure the nexus of biogenetic substance and kinship long foregrounded in American notions of mixedness, expand the contours of mixed-race subjectivity, and reshape notions of interracial relatedness. Full article

The notion of “zadruga” (named by Vuk Karadjić in 1818) was introduced in the scientific research literature, as well as in the social and political discourse, of the then young Balkan countries in the 19th century to mark the multitude of historical forms under which the “complex family organization” was known among the South-Slavic people in the region. The young Bulgarian science adopted this term in ethnographic studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bulgarian scientists, lawyers, and researchers of customary law norms attempted to implement some of the features of this family model in modern Bulgarian legislation. In the period between the two world wars, the nascent cooperative movement in the agrarian sector also used the model of the “partnership” to justify its organization. This paper analyzes similar attempts to use scientific descriptions of the zadruga in the construction of various social and economic associations in Bulgaria during the interwar period. It also analyses the attempts of the new communist leaders to use the traditions of the pre-modern society in terms of communal living in zadruga through the imposition of a cooperative system, and the nationalization of the arable land in the first years under the totalitarian system following the Second World War. Part of the Bulgarian scientific community and Bulgarian ethnography has been involved in these attempts since the early 1950s. Full article

Drawing upon fifty-five interviews with Black mixed-race people located in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, and a nearby satellite town, Bromsgrove, this article critically explores how race, identity, and whiteness, are negotiated in mixed-race families. Whilst existing studies tend to centre upon the experiences of white parents raising their children, in this article, we foreground Black mixed-race perspectives of familial practices. Whiteness can often function as an ever-present non-presence in explorations of mixed identities. We utilise concepts such as white fragility, white complicity and the white gaze to make whiteness visible and to address how racial illiteracies can manifest within everyday family settings. In doing so, we suggest that white family members can, on occasion, participate in processes of white domination even in the smallest everyday acts and conversations that deny, avoid, dismiss and, in some cases, even perpetuate racism. By identifying these moments in Black mixed-race lives, we complicate some of the studies that document the racial literacies of white parents and explore how mistakes are made. We suggest that these encounters can create moments of disjuncture in familial settings that are characterised by a complex layer of love, intimacy and racial difference. By bringing these issues to the fore, we centre the emotional labour it can take on the part of Black mixed-race people to make sense of and resist these experiences whilst simultaneously maintaining closeness within familial relationships. Full article