Family history

Western society since medieval times has been characterized by a great diversity of family organization. This diversity has had several often interrelated aspects, including geographic region, occupation, social class, and whether the family in question was rural or urban. Historically, there were considerable differences between different regions of Europe and even between different areas in the same country. Aristocrats and commoners established family customs and social institutions peculiar to their respective social classes, as did merchants and peasants. In addition, ethnic and religious minorities frequently established their own unique patterns of family life in accord with traditions and moral values that were often at variance with the rest of society.

Approaches to family history

The task of interpreting and explaining the diversity of family organization in historical times has fallen to the field of family history. Family history emerged in the 1960s as a major focus of interest within the broader field of economic and social history. Because family history draws on the methods and theories of several social sciences, it has developed its own diversity of approaches to the understanding of its subject. Three major areas of interest are relevant here; the British family historian Michael Anderson labeled them the sentiments approach, the demographic approach, and the household economics approach.

The sentiments approach

The sentiments approach emerged from the interest of many scholars in the emotional ties between family members. Proponents of this approach try to understand the character of the family as it has changed through time. Topics of interest include the nature of conjugal and parent–child relationships, courtship practices, attitudes toward sex, and the relative importance of privacy and individualism in the family context.

Most proponents of the sentiments approach argue that changes in family behaviour are the result of changes in other aspects of culture. The wider society, as it undergoes change, creates cultural values affecting the family. Religious and philosophical ideas, for example, may play a part in shaping attitudes toward individualism or social equality. Even laissez-faire capitalism, according to some writers, played a part in the development of trends toward sexual freedom. General social trends and social revolutions, such as the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, ultimately affect the behaviour and outlook of ordinary people in their family relations. The great difficulty in pursuing this approach, however, is that documentary sources are not always helpful in providing the kind of information these arguments require. Relating broad social changes to changes in sentiment is often done only through educated speculation.

The demographic approach

This approach favours more limited objectives, and its methods are akin to those of the natural sciences. Rather than literary sources, which are more frequently used by those who follow the sentiments or household economics approach, demographers concentrate on available data on households, baptisms, marriages, and burials. Parish registers in many European countries provide a large amount of source material of this kind, often going back to the 16th century. Historical demographers can use these data to build up a picture of family life at any given place and time—a particular village, for example, or a specific occupational group or social class.

The main problem of this approach is that the available data may be too incomplete or inaccurate for making useful generalizations. The original documentation may have been made for purposes of taxation or military recruitment; certainly it was not made with the interests of historians in mind. As a result, the technique of the historical demographer depends on “family reconstitution.” If a range of sources is present, the reconstruction of household size and composition, marriage patterns, and a number of other features of family organization is possible, but it is still problematic.