ABSTRACT
A case history of a family, as we understand it, is made up of narrative accounts of persons belonging to several generations of the same ‘family’, i.e. kinship group. They will be asked by the researcher to talk about their own life history and experiences, but also about those of other family members as well, however sketchily, and to comment on their relations with these other members. Family documents may of course complete the database. The point however is not to focus on one family only, but on a number of them, all ‘members’ of a common ‘social formation’—a society, a sub-society, a migration flow-within which their history has been embedded for the last generations.1 One of the properties of case histories of families is indeed to function as small mirrors of general cultural and social patterns, of societal dynamics and change; and the idea is, by multiplying them, to grasp these patterns and their dynamics of reproduction and historical transformation.
