Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

This paper discusses the grounding of the family in popular genealogy today. It applies a historical and comparative approach to the use of parish registers in three empirical cases from Austria. This use consists in a continued process of rooting the family locally, while simultaneously delocalizing it through the digital connection of data kept separate by the Catholic Church for many centuries. Grounding the family is thus a complex articulation of the modern discourse of settledness, closely bound up with a popular historical culture able to access archival sources directly for the first time in history. The paper questions the category of “imagined families”, which may marginalize this popular practice of producing kinship and perpetuate the essentialist notion of otherwise “authentic” (e.g. juridical, social, biological) families.¹

Keywords

archives, migration, genealogy, family, Austria

Publisher Notes

• This article was previously published by Museum Tusculanum Press.