Kin Keeping and Family Storytelling in Nineteenth-century French-Canadian Immigrant Letters

The Bergevin Corpus

Bibliographic Data

ID6066913
AuthorsSarah Hurlburt (corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume50
Issue102
Pages285-313
Publication date2017-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistoire sociale (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2257 • E-ISSN: 1918-6576
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/his.2017.0037
OpenAlexW2780241883
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited5

This article analyses a new archive of French-Canadian immigrant letters through the combined, trifocal lens of kin keeping and family narrative, immigrant letters, and family correspondence. Letters are the ideal access point to both the historical construction of family identity through storytelling and the kin-keeping practices that sustain it. We look at a correspondence among the large Montreal-area Bergevin family, some of whose siblings migrated westward in the 1850s and 1860s to Walla Walla, Washington, where their surviving letters, a gift from descendants, now grace a local archive. Within this family, we look at the mechanisms of kin keeping, the designation and transference of the kin-keeping role among women, and at the epistolary construction and eventual demise of a shared family identity

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Demise · Family tree · Genealogy · Ideal (ethics · Identity (music · Immigration · Literature · Narrative · Next of kin · Openness to experience · Political science · Sociology · Storytelling · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · History · Law · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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