Preliminary Programme

In recent publications, I’ve suggested that globally family historians are focused on bringing the lives of the marginalized to the fore, challenging stories about the stability of nuclear family life, gender, class, race and sexuality as well their respective ‘national’ stories. This paper will explore my collaborative work with family historians since the publication of my book on the history of poverty in colonial New South Wales Fractured Families (2015). It will focus on my work with diverse migrant communities in Australia including the Australian Lebanese Historical Society, Co.As.It and the Chinese Australian Historical Society in partnership with the State Library of NSW, State Archives, Royal Australian Historical Society and History Council of NSW. Family history that is practiced self-consciously and critically challenges the nation-focused/state-driven patriarchal history we discover so easily in our formal archives and libraries. (Show less)

This paper will examine the importance of engaging with the material culture of social welfare provision to understand the history of poverty, while exploring how collaboration between researchers at Carleton College and the Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum has led to the development of a 3-D virtual House of Industry. Together with student researchers and a Digital Humanities Fellow, our work has encompassed a meticulous examination of the fabric of the Gressenhall House of Industry, whose building has become the Farm and Workhouse Museum of Norfolk and the creation of a virtual 18th century workhouse. Exploring the detail required for the creation of the virtual model engaged museum and college staff, students and volunteers in thinking about the complex architectural and cultural history of the building, and how this is best expressed to diverse visitors. Tying the model to microhistories of inmates and staff recorded in the frustratingly incomplete 18th century records for the institution brought new research questions to the fore, and has deepened our understanding of the geographies and histories of the building. The talk will examine the strengths (and pitfalls) of working collaboratively across different sectors and the Atlantic. (Show less)

This paper will consider the potential of collaborating with archival volunteers as historical researchers to address new sources and new questions in the history of the English Old Poor Law. The AHRC-funded project ‘Small Bills and Petty Finance’ has been running since January 2018 and has seen volunteers in three British county archives unpacking the contents of overseers’ vouchers – ie the receipts demonstrating payment for goods and services supplied to the parish poor – and undertaking microstudies of the people involved. Volunteers bring their genealogical and local-history expertise to bear on the lives of tradespeople, parish officers, and others whose stories have so far been opaque, and offer them to public scrutiny via the project blog. This talk will report on data collection and discuss volunteer participation in directing research. It will go on to analyse the different needs of archival, academic, and volunteer sectors, and offer some preliminary conclusions about successful practice at the intersections between the three. (Show less)