DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN FAMILY

Nearly ten years ago, historians "discovered" the family as a valid field of historical inquiry. During the ensuing years, two aspects of family history have combined to make it a popular topic. First, it provided issues interesting to students that also allowed them to do both extensive and meaningful primary research. Second, historians at last realized what psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists had long known that the family was the fundamental unit of social organization. If they were to understand the dynamics of the societies they studied, they needed to understand this most basic institution. Despite the relative newness of the field, historians of the family have systematically searched out and used a wide variety of sources to document their subject. From these records, researchers have been able to sketch the contours of the family's function and significance in past times. For the nineteenth and parts of the twentieth centuries, the most important of these sources have been the various censuses that federal, state and local governments have used to enumerate their inhabitants. Dedicated genealogists have, for decades, known the value of these censuses in tracing individual families back through the generations. With them they have located grandparents and greatgrandparents, lost uncles and sometimes the secrets of the family's "black sheep." They have followed their families from Germany to New York to Pennsylvania and on to Illinois, and from jobs as teamsters and domestics to vocations as bankers and teachers. Through the censuses, those people interested in particular families or individuals have been able to reconstruct the lives of their subjects. Now historians, by modifying and expanding the techniques of genealogists, are studying the experiences of many families within