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.
Keywords:
genealogy, family, migration, archives, Austria
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