ABSTRACT
Mette Seidelin and Christian Larsen observe that in Denmark and in many other countries, a desire has arisen to gain access to personal data in order to re-find and document one’s own story, including the most problematic experiences from one’s childhood. The question is, however, whether the voices, experiences and memories of childhood can be re-found in the archives and grant the adult child’s wish to break the silence of the past? Can one find the voice of the child, and if so, how is it expressed? In this chapter, they examine whether the voices of the many children who appear in the records and minutes held in the archives and who have so far been silent or silenced can be found. They conclude that the child’s voice is rarely explicitly recorded in the archives, but if one applies a broader understanding of ‘the voice of the child’, one ‘hears’ the children; not just through the retelling of the child’s experiences by adults but also from the emotional utterances that emerges in the source material.
