ABSTRACT
Life stories are thus, in themselves, a form of transmission; but at the same time they often indicate in a broader sense what is passed down in families. This chapter deals with the analysis of an Anglo-French comparative study, carried out with Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, whose objective has been to link the normally separate fields of study, social mobility and the family. In a family business, whether or not customers are inherited, there will always be a transmission of work opportunities, and sometimes at the same time of working equipment and specialized skills. A family of ships’ carpenters and shipping clerks, for example, lived in a ‘house full of ships; it’s all ships, water, and sea’. Family stories are the grist of social description, the raw material for both history and social change; but we need to listen to them more attentively than that. They are also the symbolic coinage of exchange between the generations, of family transmission.
