ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s, family history began to flourish within the academy. While demographers were uncovering the aggregate Australian family experience, family-centred community and social histories abounded. More recently ‘collective’ or ‘group’ family histories have appeared. The tide has turned so emphatically that Australian historians are now notable internationally for the extent to which they have researched and written the histories of their own families, a genre known as egohistoire. Similarly, the National Centre of Biography (NCB) at the Australian National University, which hosts the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), is increasingly concerned with family history. Since 2012 the NCB/ADB has been comprehensively indexing biographical records of Australian families. The meticulous gathering of rich metadata and the process of indexing is supporting the visualisation of relationships through family trees and social network graphs showing spousal relations and family networks. This chapter considers the changing academic landscape which has led the NCB/ADB to provide family history research tools free-to-air and to research family history itself.
