Secrets and Lies: the Radical Potential of Family History

I started to realize the benefits of combining the methodologies of academic social and cultural history with those of family history when I turned to the services of a genealogist to trace the children of a Second World War Mass Observation diarist. I wanted to edit and publish their mother's diary. Within half a day, supplied only with their date of birth and an inaccurate date of birth for their mother, the genealogist had found them - twins, born 5 October 1941. Stunned to learn that he could discover their identity in such a short time, I acknowledged a new respect and gratitude for the skills of genealogists and the role which digital technology could play in the acquisition of historical knowledge.¹

The growth of family history from the 1970s has revolutionized access to historical sources within archival institutions and on the internet. In my research on illegitimacy I was interested to find that there were so many unknown bastards, in so many families. At the same time, as a historian of the family and of motherhood, I have been intrigued by the ways in which academic and family historians were categorized as different, our needs and requirements dichotomized by the cultural institutions within which we worked on some of the same sources and where we shared space.² When I moved to Australia in 2008 I learned that family history was especially popular amongst individuals coming to terms with their convict pasts.³ Family history has until recently received little serious attention from professional and academic historians in Australia, despite being one of the strongest cultural industries there for the past thirty years and stronger indeed than in any other country.⁴ Family secrets of illegitimacy and criminality coalesced in my new research project on the transnational history of motherhood in early colonial Australia and Britain 1750-1850. Convicts and 'illegitimates' are no longer expunged from people's family stories and most individuals are willing to embrace ancestors who broke the rules which we have believed carried so much weight in the past. What doesn't surprise me, but does others, is the large numbers of those who broke rules and who got away with it.

Family historians have been dismissed by professional and academic historians, in Australia and beyond, as 'misty-eyed and syrupy' and their

Fig. 1.

Family and household connections of Amelia (also known as Emma) Goodwin and of Anna Josepha King, who both sailed from England to Australia on the Speedy in 1799-1800, and of Charlotte Waring.

Fig. 2.

Philip Gidley and Anna Josepha King, with their children Phillip Parker (b. 1791), Anna Maria (b. 1793) and Elizabeth (b. 1797). Portrait by Robert Dighton (1752-1814).

findings and practices deemed irrelevant to the wider historical community.⁵ Some people have categorized them as conservative, with a big and a small c, for their supposedly nostalgic search for a golden age of the family. Noeline Kyle argues that genealogy provides families with a sense of identity in a period when many of them are undergoing transformation and disruption. It 'was once a quest for social status and recognition, but in the 1990s [and beyond], as its base has broadened, it has become a search for identity'. ⁶ Others have suggested that they search for their family trees to find 'something solid in a shifting world'.⁷ I want to suggest that when it comes to broader questions of historical change and continuity the techniques and findings of family historians disrupt many of our assumptions about the past. The construction of a family tree, the discovery of manifold secrets and lies, throw into question the solidity not only of the history of family, class relationships and the power relations between men and women but also of the history of nation and empire. Each newly discovered document encourages the historian to add to or question the narrative so far. The 'pioneer myths' so beloved of a certain class of Australians, usually of European descent...