Volume 42, Issue 3

Genealogy, once a specialized research practice, is increasingly a common social practice enabled by digitization and cultural intermediaries that support the construction of family histories. The idea of finding out about oneself through an exploration of the character and lives of ancestors is a growing social practice reflected in popular culture. Tracing one’s personal traits through past family members and extending the sense of family and identity back in time potentially enriches personal identity and link personal, social and cultural memory. In this paper, an episode of the popular BBC TV program Who Do You Think You Are? is presented in which, it is argued, the celebrity guest embarks on a quest to construct a personalized history of the present as a way of resolving personal problems and understanding the basis of their celebrity. The implications of this analysis are expanded on to aid an understanding of the media representations of genealogy as a social practice and the media representation of the relation between history and memory.

There has been little communication studies research into the neonatal end-of-life photography offered to families experiencing the death of a newborn in hospital settings. To contribute insight into how families experience this photography, a phenomenological study was conducted with parents ( n = 10) who had photos taken around the death of their newborns within a Canadian neonatal intensive care unit. This article reports findings from data collected through semi-structured interviews about the meaning these photographs hold for families after they leave the hospital and about their experience of sharing these images with others. The paper concludes with a discussion on neonatal end-of-life photography as domestic photography, contextualizing the practice within the contemporary culture of constant capture and circulation of family snapshots. I propose the public presence of these photographs as family photographs has potential to challenge the current culture in which expressions of mourning around reproductive loss are otherwise rendered invisible.

Domestic photography and the family photograph album hold significance as artefacts “communicating an ideal familial image and reifying the familial bonds, and also preserving a memory of a specific time” (Sarvas and Frohlich, 2011, p. 148). However, today’s practice of domestic photography is generally relocated to social media (Sarvas and Frohlich, 2011). Photographs previously found in the family photograph album are now likely to be located on the screens of phones and tablets. Using a Domestication of Technology framework, this article discusses how families are using Facebook to create, curate, share and archive family memories. It shows how families go through the phases of appropriation, incorporation, objectification and conversion when they adopt Facebook as the family photograph album. The authors also explore ways in which virtual family photograph albums can result in parental tension around domestic tasks of sharing and archiving family memories online, along with the possible implications of creating a potentially embarrassing, unauthorized digital footprint for their children.

Danish descendants of former national socialists live in a society that characterizes their parents as traitors. They are therefore likely to experience a stark divergence between how the past is described in media texts and in their families. Taking media use as the starting point, this contribution explores the role Occupation-related media texts play for Nazi descendants and how they relate them to memories generated in their families. The contribution is empirically based on five semi-structured, qualitative interviews with children of former Danish Nazis. To understand the respondents’ media use, a remembered media repertoires approach is developed and employed in conjunction with a semi-narrative interview strategy. The findings suggest that respondents from families that have cultivated a memory about the Nazi past use media texts to supplement their family memory and criticize the mainstream cultural memory, whereas respondents from families where this past was a taboo avoid Occupation-related media texts but accept the cultural memory’s portrayal of national socialists.