ABSTRACT
Another key forum for the ‘amateur’ interaction with the past is genealogical investigation. Genealogy has facilitated academic research in a number of ways. The field of family reconstitution studies became important during the late 1980s, particularly with the publication of John Knodel’s Demographic Behaviour in the Past in 1988. Family reconstitution and historical demography have roots in the same historiographical movements as local history.1 In 1964, E.A. Wrigley and Peter Laslett founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure to investigate local and micro-social structure, household organisation and demography; they also founded Local Population Studies. The local becomes the site for exploration of social change, focussed through family structures and demographic data. As a model for critical and philosophical inquiry genealogy has also been theorised in relationship to subjectivity as a means of writing the self.2
