From Memory to Research

Today genealogy enjoys a wide range of enthusiastic practitioners, and almost every extended family has a self-appointed family historian. Along with professional historians, genealogists are ubiquitous at archives both in Germany and the United States. Of course this was not always so; until about one hundred years ago genealogy was the almost exclusive purview of nobles and aristocrats who had rather immediate concerns driving their inquiries into their families' pasts. That changed around 1900 in Germany, when in the words of a “how-to” guide for amateur researchers written in 1920, genealogy underwent a transformation from a “nobleman's sport” to a bourgeois “science.” This meant that, “today the middle class constitutes four fifths, nay nine tenths, of the biggest genealogical societies.” According to the growing corpus of genealogical literature, the middle class had marked family research with superior values and a greater dedication to truth and knowledge. Beyond the rhetoric, the bourgeois acceptance of genealogy altered the ways that middle-class families saw and remembered the past

Amateur · Archaeology · Art · Bourgeoisie · Class (philosophy · Epistemology · Genealogy · German · Linguistics · Literature · Middle class · Political science · Rhetoric · Sensibility · Classics · European history and politics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Philosophy

• Rodologia

  Open Access•Inna Leykin•Ethos•2015

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