Cirrus@Austlit

This Special Issue of Life Writing emerged from a workshop initially co-organised by Jerome de Groot and Tanya Evans. They planned to hold this in collaboration with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in Kent Street, Sydney, Australia in April 2020. Evans had previously collaborated with SAG on several occasions since 2012 through different research projects on family history (Evans 2015, 2022). These collaborations included interactive talks, help with recruitment on family history research projects, the dissemination of research on the practice and meanings of family history and networking among family historians. At the time, de Groot and Evans were co-authoring an article on the value of collaborative public history projects in Australia and Britain, both focused on their international engagements with the family history community (Evans, de Groot, and Stallard Forthcoming). They held two successful, lively, interactive, participatory and well-attended workshops including international scholarly researchers on family history together with family historians at Manchester City Library in the UK in September 2017 (de Groot and Evans 2017) and at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney in July 2018 (Evans and de Groot 2019). Covid 19 prevented Jerome’s travel to Australia in early 2020 and the whole world went into lockdown soon after. We hoped the workshop might encourage everyone to re-evaluate the research practices and interests of family historians which we knew to be often scathingly defined by others as unscientific, uncritical, emotional and of little value to the academy or anyone else bar individual researchers’ families.' (Tanya Evans & Marian Lorrison : Family History and Life Writing : Introduction)