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Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community...
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Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778). This special issue belongs to the section "Family History".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2024) | Viewed by 13803

Printed Edition Available!
A printed edition of this Special Issue is available here.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Catriona Pennell

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
History Department, University of Exeter, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK
Interests: 19th and 20th century British and Irish history; social and cultural history of modern conflict; British imperial activity in the Middle East since the 1880s; ordinary people and communities in global war; the on-going (and often bloody) relationship between current conflict and imperial pasts; young people, memory and the violent past
Dr. Chris Kempshall

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
History Department, University of Exeter, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK
Interests: The First World War; popular representations of warfare; public engagement during the First World War centenary

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, edited by Dr. Chris Kempshall and Professor Catriona Pennell, is an outcome of the AHRC-funded project Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present, undertaken by scholars at both Northumbria University and the University of Exeter. The focus of this project was to explore how ephemera and ephemeral objects can be used to transmit new understandings of experiences relating to British military action throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Of particular importance to those working on the project was the idea that these objects may provide an insight into the military experiences of those whose histories exist outside of the mainstream; those from marginalised or underrepresented communities who are not always featured in the dominant forms of commemoration or reflection.

This Special Issue takes this concept and aims to expand it further by exploring objects, stories, and people beyond just the British. The article authors span both emerging and established academics, featuring a wide variety of objects and conflicts which help us to reframe our existing understandings of the experience of war and its aftermath.

As outlined in the Special Issue’s introduction, also written by Dr Kempshall and Prof Pennell, the ways in which we understand both war and the objects and narratives it leaves behind are heavily influenced by existing societal and social pressures. It is our hope that this collection of articles and the scholarship of their authors will contribute important new considerations to the fields of cultural, social, and military history.

Prof. Dr. Catriona Pennell
Dr. Chris Kempshall
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • family history
  • war
  • ephemera
  • memory
  • marginalized histories

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Published Papers (12 papers)

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10 pages, 214 KiB  
Editorial
Introduction: Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories
by Chris Kempshall and Catriona Pennell
Genealogy 2024, 8(3), 114; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030114 - 6 Sep 2024
Viewed by 557
Abstract
This Special Issue seeks to broaden our understanding of the role of ephemera and material culture in preserving conflict experiences and memories, with particular focus on the diverse—and potentially subversive—nature of family history, community narration, and generational transmission [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
14 pages, 2895 KiB  
Article
Curating Community behind Barbed Wire: Canadian Prisoner of War Art from the Second World War
by Sarafina Pagnotta
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020054 - 10 May 2024
Viewed by 1402
Abstract
Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of [...] Read more.
Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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14 pages, 248 KiB  
Article
“Wartime” Ephemera from the Family Home in German and Austrian History Museums: A Counterexample to the British Case
by Chloe Paver
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 70; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020070 - 3 Jun 2024
Viewed by 794
Abstract
When discussing “wartime ephemera”, of the kind that has been passed down through families since the Second World War, Germany and Austria could be considered as a counterexample to Britain. In German and Austrian historical memory, “wartime” cannot be separated from pre-war Nazi [...] Read more.
When discussing “wartime ephemera”, of the kind that has been passed down through families since the Second World War, Germany and Austria could be considered as a counterexample to Britain. In German and Austrian historical memory, “wartime” cannot be separated from pre-war Nazi society (beginning in 1933 and 1938, respectively). Moreover, what we might loosely call the “Antiques Roadshow experience”—discussing family objects from the Second World War in a sympathetic public forum—has never been open to the majority of Germans and Austrians, who were rather inclined to hide and forget such objects in the family home. Even so, mundane Nazi-era objects survived in their millions and this essay discusses their display in German and Austrian history museums. There, they serve to illustrate a history of mentalities during and after the Nazi regime. Austrian museums are currently playing a proactive role in the transfer of objects from the private, family archive to public, cultural memory. This article considers how notions of “family” are constructed in museum discourse and asks how the millions of German and Austrian citizens and residents with no family connection to the Second World War can be included in a form of national family storytelling that arguably “re-ethnicizes” memory. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
13 pages, 1225 KiB  
Article
The Case for Reading War Poetry as Ephemera
by Julia Ribeiro S. C. Thomaz
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020055 - 10 May 2024
Viewed by 974
Abstract
The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families [...] Read more.
The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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16 pages, 3953 KiB  
Article
“This Is How/You’ll End”: Holocaust Poems as War Ephemera
by Yael S. Hacohen
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 53; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020053 - 10 May 2024
Viewed by 1224
Abstract
During the Holocaust, poets went to extraordinary lengths to write their poems and transmit them. Poems that were written during those years were often buried in the ground, stitched into clothing, smuggled out of prisons, or graffitied onto walls. These object documents carried [...] Read more.
During the Holocaust, poets went to extraordinary lengths to write their poems and transmit them. Poems that were written during those years were often buried in the ground, stitched into clothing, smuggled out of prisons, or graffitied onto walls. These object documents carried more than facts about these events; they carried the feeling of living through these events. This research explores the last poems of four Holocaust poets, Władysław Szlengel, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Hannah Szenes, and Abramek Koplowicz, investigating not only the poems but their object-ness and their stories of transference. These poems, like urgent postcards, deliver messages to a family, to a community, to the world. They ask―what does it mean to write a poem as a last will and testament? Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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15 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
The Mystery of the Tanganyika Knife and the Rediscovery of the Polish Refugee Experience of Britain’s Wartime Empire
by Kasia Tomasiewicz
Genealogy 2024, 8(3), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030089 - 8 Jul 2024
Viewed by 895
Abstract
My Polish grandmother was sixteen when she arrived in Bolton. By the time teenagers today sit their GCSE examinations, she had travelled the distance of almost three-quarters of the globe. From Drohobycz in Poland (now modern Ukraine) following the arrest and murder of [...] Read more.
My Polish grandmother was sixteen when she arrived in Bolton. By the time teenagers today sit their GCSE examinations, she had travelled the distance of almost three-quarters of the globe. From Drohobycz in Poland (now modern Ukraine) following the arrest and murder of her father by the USSR’s NKVD aged 6, to a detention camp in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, to Iran, Tanganyika, and South Africa, before finally settling in England. Hers is a story of Stalin’s crimes, but it is simultaneously a story of how refugees utilised the global connections and routes created by the British Empire. It is also a postwar story of how she made a home in the nation that facilitated her wartime life. She carried with her few possessions, bar a bone letter-opener knife with an elephant carved into the handle, which she passed down to me. Bringing scholarship around refugee experiences, family histories, and material culture into conversation, this journal article seeks to achieve three things. First, it brings the story of the Polish refugees who utilised the imperial routes, colonies, dominions, and nations of British ‘interest’ to greater attention. While there has been some research into this in Britain, it has been an under-explored aspect of wartime experience which shows us as much about the war in the East as it does the inherently global nature of the war. Second, it asks what role the memory of the Polish refugee experience serves, both for those who lived through it and for subsequent generations. And finally, it addresses how this memory, beyond the Polish diaspora, might be used to explore more the nuances of life during the Second World War. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
13 pages, 683 KiB  
Article
‘A Return, a Mirror, a Photograph’: Return Journeys, Material Culture and Intergenerational Transmission in a Greek Cypriot Refugee Family
by Christakis Peristianis
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020057 - 10 May 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1102
Abstract
During times of war, displaced families carry various material items that later serve as means for preserving the memories of lost homes and maintaining a sense of identity. In divided Cyprus, the use of material objects by people displaced before and during the [...] Read more.
During times of war, displaced families carry various material items that later serve as means for preserving the memories of lost homes and maintaining a sense of identity. In divided Cyprus, the use of material objects by people displaced before and during the 1974 Turkish invasion has been influenced by the opening of checkpoints between the two sides in 2003. This paper explores how different generations in my family reacted to and interpreted the rediscovery of a lost material item—a handmade mirror piece—during the return journey. It discusses how my mother located the item, photographed it, and placed its photograph in the family’s photographic archive. During the research project upon which this paper follows from, both items re-emerged through my mother’s storytelling about her experience of return, transforming the project into a form of intergenerational transmission. The paper portrays how the storytelling about the mirror piece and its photograph was interpreted differently by me and my mother, influenced by the different politics of memory. The paper also showcases the resourcefulness of refugee families in maintaining the memory of their lost homes, which simultaneously reveals their views and hopes regarding the political future of the island. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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18 pages, 29274 KiB  
Article
Working Backwards, Moving Forwards: Ephemera and Diversity in Australian Stories of Indigenous Second World War Service
by Rachel Caines
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020061 - 16 May 2024
Viewed by 1245
Abstract
Over recent decades, historians, communities, and museum professionals have worked to share and understand stories of Indigenous Australian military service. This article posits that ephemera from the Australian War Memorial’s National Collection offer a tangible way to engage with personal stories and enrich [...] Read more.
Over recent decades, historians, communities, and museum professionals have worked to share and understand stories of Indigenous Australian military service. This article posits that ephemera from the Australian War Memorial’s National Collection offer a tangible way to engage with personal stories and enrich the narrative(s) of Indigenous service in the Second World War. While many experiences were shared by the thousands of men and women who enlisted and served during the war, surviving ephemera and the related personal stories reveal the cultural, linguistic, and experiential diversity of the individuals who served. Using five case studies from the Australian War Memorial’s National Collection, this article explores the link between ephemera and stories of service and suggests that sharing these links with a wider audience can serve to broaden understandings of Indigenous service and sacrifice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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17 pages, 1292 KiB  
Article
The Typography of Forgetting: The Unsettling of Dominant Social Narratives in the Resurfacing of a Military Deserter in Family Memory
by Andrew Milne
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020060 - 14 May 2024
Viewed by 1279
Abstract
Society expects history to be objective and factual. Collectively history is the memory of the nation, that group, the imagined community that believes that it has always been together. It could even be said that the nation is about forgetting; forgetting that the [...] Read more.
Society expects history to be objective and factual. Collectively history is the memory of the nation, that group, the imagined community that believes that it has always been together. It could even be said that the nation is about forgetting; forgetting that the people who make up that community were not always together as they are now, or the forgetting of those hurdles and hindrances that create obstacles to cohesion and continuity. Memory is collaborative by nature, and provides a legacy to society, a response to its own mortality in the future. This paper proposes to examine the case of subjective recounting of the past through a family memory of war, the forgetting, the gaps created in narratives to enable cohesion and to fit in with publicly acceptable discourse. It ultimately attempts to answer the question as to why it might be important to re-examine such stories of an individual nature, in a wider scope of the nation, and links those seemingly antinomic periods of time of past, present, and future, which are not as exclusive as might be believed. This paper focuses upon a deserter ancestor, going against the grain of traditional narratives. Traditionally, soldiers are considered by definition of what is expected from them in the national narrative, as ‘war heroes’. However, this paper examines the life of a military ancestor who, in reality, did not fit into that framework, and who deserted from the army (although never on the front line, thus avoiding being shot). Nevertheless, the multiple desertions (deserted five times in total, lost kit twice, was imprisoned, and was detained for desertion three times) only ‘resurfaced’ recently due to the availability of documentation and research carried out in archives. While the ancestor conformed socially to what was expected of him, the reality of his military files seems to reveal the contrary. Despite the high numbers of times that he did desert, he did also rejoin every time, and ended up spending 3 decades in the same military unit. Or, perhaps the manner in which society views soldiers pre- and post-WWI has been altered, and, as such, desertion was not once what it has become. Forgetting has been the norm in society regarding certain pasts that step outside of the national narrative, rather than remembering. This paper attempts to imagine the nation’s past in a different way, by including those who also deserted, an area of ill-defined research in military history. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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15 pages, 257 KiB  
Article
Making the Memory Book: War-Time Loss and Memorialization through Ephemera
by Bruce Scates
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020064 - 20 May 2024
Viewed by 1159
Abstract
This article explores the way a family fashioned a memorial to a son ‘taken by the war’. It focuses on the Robert’s collection in Melbourne, Australia’s largest bound collection of war time ephemera, and the making of what was called ‘Frank’s Memory Book’. [...] Read more.
This article explores the way a family fashioned a memorial to a son ‘taken by the war’. It focuses on the Robert’s collection in Melbourne, Australia’s largest bound collection of war time ephemera, and the making of what was called ‘Frank’s Memory Book’. It argues that families asserted ownership over their dead, crafting different modes of memorialization to authorized modes of remembrance, considers the way communities of mourners were brought together and highlights tensions between private loss and public memory. The making of ephemera is examined at length as is the part material culture plays in libraries and archives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
13 pages, 232 KiB  
Article
The Memory-Keeping Daughter: Exploring Object Stories and Family Legacies from America’s Modern Wars
by Susan R. Grayzel
Genealogy 2024, 8(3), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030096 - 25 Jul 2024
Viewed by 946
Abstract
This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent [...] Read more.
This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent public history project collecting objects and object stories in the American southwest, it argues that a focus on daughters as caretakers of family military history offers a new way to engage with descendants’ histories by showing how the work of such women can contribute to our understanding of modern war and its legacies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
18 pages, 3425 KiB  
Article
Waiting to Be Discovered? Community Partnerships, the Facilitation of Diverse Memory, and Reflections on Academic Success and Failure
by Chris Kempshall, Catriona Pennell and Felicity Tattersall
Genealogy 2024, 8(2), 62; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8020062 - 17 May 2024
Viewed by 931
Abstract
Community partnerships, based on ‘the collaborative turn’ in academic research, are an increasingly common framework through which ‘bottom-up’ histories, particularly of diverse and/or more marginalised communities, are being told. This article is about the ‘doing’ of this type of work. It focuses on [...] Read more.
Community partnerships, based on ‘the collaborative turn’ in academic research, are an increasingly common framework through which ‘bottom-up’ histories, particularly of diverse and/or more marginalised communities, are being told. This article is about the ‘doing’ of this type of work. It focuses on the question: what lessons can be made visible when attempted cooperation fails to deliver the outcomes initially hoped for? Firstly, this article outlines the events and activities undertaken by the authors in exploring the ways that ephemera and other objects can be used to understand and transmit the historical experiences of communities often on the periphery of mainstream war commemoration. It will discuss the ways in which connections with these communities were built, with the aim of undertaking several creative writing workshops, leading to a co-produced publication of the participants’ material. Secondly, as part of a broader acknowledgment of the possibility of failure and its benefits, it will explore why some of these creative workshop efforts failed to meet expectations and outline a series of recommendations for other historians and community-orientated projects to consider for future activities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wartime Ephemera and the Transmission of Diverse Family and Community Histories)
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