Family Historians and Historians of the Family: The Value of Collaboration

This piece will reflect on a collaboration between social historians Laura King and Jessica Hammett and a small group of family historians, as part of a UK-based project ‘Living with Dying: Everyday Cultures of Dying within Family Life in Britain, c.1900-50s’. It will discuss the methodology we developed to work with family historians for mutual benefit, and consider the potential for further collaboration between different kinds of historians – in and outside academic institutions – within the context of ever-growing popularity of family history. It will argue that sustained collaboration has the potential to offer new opportunities and methodologies for a history from below approach, by utilising the expertise embedded in families, by accessing family stories and memories, and by opening up new private family ‘archives’ of non-elite families.