History from below

Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life

Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era

Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America. By Steven Ruggles. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. xx + 282 pp. Cloth, $37.50; paper $15.75.)

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2017: List of Publications

This thesis presents kinship collation a social history tool that can reveal the sense of community as experienced by past individuals from the mapping of their networks with related people across landscapes, social institutions and economic activity. The tool was developed from a doctoral project that worked from the interdisciplinary scholarly space created by modern, digitised genealogical endeavour and synergises methodological theories with processes that can repurpose the British-sphere record base of enumeration returns and population records.The thesis challenges the longstanding belief that British data does not carry information on the kinship behaviours of nineteenth-century actors; instead, it reveals that the data has been intentionally and unintentionally hidden. It has taken the development of improved accessibility, enhanced visualisation and data management technology combined with a specific theorisation of kinship to reveal the varied kinship connectivity that ran through society influenced in form by socioeconomic currents. The thesis, therefore, asserts that British orthodoxy on kinship has fallen behind the theoretical discussions on the nature of kinship as mutuality and reciprocity between actors as it manifests in European cultures. The discourse follows an anthropological argument that not all relatives, even close ones are automatically kin, aligned to a hypothesis that kinship is not limited to the private world of the domestic co-residency.The importance of kinship collation to map the lived community and identify kinship is amplified from a Scottish region; the sprawl of kinship is tracked as it was sustained across continents, over many decades and passed between generations. The networks are analysed for indicators of social forces that operated through the structures of the modern world, democracy, liberal values and capitalist structures and as individual social capital that stabilised women and men in their situations.

Kinship Collation: Trends in 19th Century UK kinship networks evidenced from rural Aberdeenshire

This article examines the juncture point between British-(Anglo)-American elite women in the first half of the twentieth century, their female networks and newspapers. It considers the maternal background, reconstructing biological and fictive kinships, to illustrate generational patterns leading to both female barrier-breaking in elite western institutions and clustering in the political and charitable work environments. The paper covers a century of adult female life using a central stem matrikin whose activities can be recovered through press-cuttings which chart change and continuity of values, confidence, identity and self-awareness through the range of kin based networks. It reconsiders the background to the 1970s breakthrough of women in leadership within elite political and charitable western institutions which has previously been considered as a result of effective equal opportunities combatting barriers rooted in male networking patterns. Finally, it reflects on the nature of the press as encoun...

/pdf/change-and-continuity-networking-newspaper-kinships-and-2rtvemxu4m.pdf

Change and Continuity: Networking, Newspaper, Kinships and Twentieth Century Elite Women

There has been a quiet cultural drift towards professionalism in genealogy over the last two decades. Developments in the UK on this subject have resulted in educational offerings that support professionalism through accountability to service consumers while a US debate has pushed for a recognised and regarded scholarship to underpin the professional genealogist. This article places the educational and learning needs of three broad groups of genealogists into the framework of the professional debate in its generality and genealogical specifics. With a concentration on the British context, the article considers the cultural–commercial signals and support offered to ‘armchair enthusiasts’; the emerging models of professional education and formation aimed at lineage makers and the ongoing fractured models of scholastic genealogy. Looking ahead at educational needs, genealogy like other professions is now under threat from advances in artificial intelligence and algorithms, which could slice through the underpinnings of genealogical professionalism. The article concludes with a discussion of an alternative approach to genealogical education derived from the proposition that professionalism is to be found in the outputs and outcomes rather than the organisation of the practitioners of economic activity. From this stance, the needs of a full range of people pursuing genealogy can be addressed and their work informed by the developing understanding of Euroamerican kinship.

https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/2/1/12/pdf

Iain E. E. Riddell

Papers

Kinship Collation: Trends in 19th Century UK kinship networks evidenced from rural Aberdeenshire

Change and Continuity: Networking, Newspaper, Kinships and Twentieth Century Elite Women

To Alleviate or Elevate the Euroamerican Genealogy Fever