Family history at the crossroads: reflections on past, present, and future challenges

This paper contains the reflections of the author on the state of family history within the constellation of History and the Social Sciences. The first part of the paper presents a brief outline of how the discipline was founded and the elements in play that contributed to its enormous initial success, especially visible during the last three decades of the twentieth century. In recent years, however, there is some indication that research output on family history has been in decline and, more important, appears to have lost a significant part of the luster it once had. In the second part of this paper the author looks at the importance of promoting a past-present dialogue on the family and the way both historians and social scientists understand it. Ways of strengthening interactions between family history and family studies are discussed, as is the crucial importance for the discipline of the data revolution currently underway that for the first time offers massive information about families around the world over the past six decades. The author argues that both historians and social scientists have much to say about family life during this relatively recent past, albeit from very different perspectives. Studying family change constitutes a key challenge for the field. We discuss different ways of approaching this issue in the recent past, as well as the advisability of looking at the concept of family systems more closely. In societies or regions where earlier more historical data exist (normally in the more developed world), it may also be possible to link existing historical results to those from the census microdata era in order to provide a new, long-term perspective on family life spanning two centuries or even more. For social scientists and family historians alike, understanding the key dimensions of change and their implications for society constitute a crucial challenge for the discipline.