2018 December - 21 articles
By all rights, I should be dead. Not once, but a number of times. On 23 March 1979, as a 24-year-old, I witnessed and photographed the brutal beating of a young man in a sarape by some 10–12 Sheriff’s deputies on Whittier Blvd in East Los...
This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. The first part of the paper argues that whilst class is structurally present in adoption work, t...
In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. Transnatio...
Uruu patrilineages and genealogical narratives about them are important aspects of Kyrgyz social practice and reflect some tensions and contradictions in contemporary Kyrgyz self-understanding and identities. This article explores the complex relatio...
Selecting national emblems is crucial for the development of a national identity. This paper presents all official proposals for the coat of arms of the Republic of Macedonia, starting in 1992, with the proposals of the public competition for the sel...
The Immigrant Ancestors Project (IAP) is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, which is located in Provo, Utah, United States. For eighteen years, students have served summer internships in Europe to ac...
Little has been taught about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 when approximately 1.5 million Armenians were brutally slaughtered. Moreover, the events are still being denied today. Community College Math Professor Barbara Erysian, an unlikely candidate...
Trauma is a central concept in the historiography of the Holocaust. In both the historiographical and the psychoanalytical research on the subject, the Holocaust is perceived not as a finite event that took place in the past, but as one that continue...
The vast popularity of the Game of Thrones franchise has drawn a new and diverse audience to the fantasy genre. Within the pseudo-medieval world created by G.R.R. Martin, a great deal of detail has gone into establishing coats of arms for the charact...
Direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing is a new and growing industry that has gained widespread media coverage and public interest. Its scientific base is in the fields of population and evolutionary genetics and it has benefitted considerably f...
With the overwhelming popularity of genealogy-themed television series, genetic genealogy testing, online subscription services for research, and the enduring aphorism of Sankofa, people of African descent are consistently dispelling the long-avowed...
One might perceive the Middle Ages as an era of certain rights and privileges. Social stratification or the conformation of a group’s identity were all established around privileges in the Kingdom of Hungary. In the medieval period, as opposed...
The United States, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, was the ‘first new nation’. It may be at least anticipated, therefore, that genealogy, history, and the narration of time would prove more than usually complicated in a po...
Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and seg...
John Pelan, Director of the Scottish Council on Archives (SCA), explores some of the challenges around searching Scotland’s archives online. Difficulties in accessing information, knowing what exists and where to find it, and the multiplicity o...
There has been a number of studies on the outcomes of adoption reunions, most of which have focussed on relatively ‘fresh’ reunions. Very few studies have looked at long-term outcomes. Fewer still have discussed reunions and kinship with controversy...
William Gage’s Geborener Deutscher, a print newsletter distributed by traditional mail from the late 1980s until 2003, and the eponymous Internet forum Gage established in 2000 on Yahoo Groups, provide search resources and community support spe...
The members of the Torroja family were extremely important as advisers on political and military strategy to the counts of Barcelona (monarchs of the Crown of Aragon) Arnaldo was elected Grand Master of the Knights Templar (1181–1184). On 30 Se...
Coats of arms have, from their first appearance, been one of the primary visual expressions of a person’s lineage and indirectly of status. Individual members of a lineage had a choice: They could use the arms adopted by an ancestor with or wit...
National identities are social phenomena with concrete—both political and social—effects in society, but a fundamental part of their constitution takes place through narratives about the collective. The existence of collective identities...
A great deal of both scholarly and public attention has been paid to questions of nature versus nurture in understanding identity and family construction in adoptees, yet much less attention has been given to the ways that power shapes the social rep...
