Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Selected Internet Resources on Family History

Steven Mintz

A Colonial Family and Community: <http://www.hfmgv.org/smartfun/colonial/intro/>. Targeted at grade school students, this site, created by the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, examines the life of the Daggett family, who lived in Coventry, Connecticut, during the mid eighteenth century.

Images of the Colonial Family and Beyond: <http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/colfam.html>. Family portraits and photographs help students visualize the changing nature of family life over time and encourage them to think about shifts in families’ size and structure, gender and family roles, and emotional and power dynamics. Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender of CUNY, this site provides students with artistic representations of American family life dating from the mid eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, along with a series of discussion questions.

Redefining Family at Colonial Williamsburg: <http://www.history.org/almanack/life/family/essay.htm>. Produced by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, this site explores the lives of real colonial Virginian families and how they approached life passages such as courtship, marriage, birth, childhood, and death.

Religion, Women, and the Family in Early America, by Christine Leigh Heyrman: <http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelwom.htm>. This site features one of a series of essays designed to help high school teachers of American history bring their students to a greater understanding of the role religion has played in the development of the United States. Placed online by the National Humanities Center, this project examines the role of religion in shaping relations between husbands and wives and parents and children in colonial America.

The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830: <http://www.uampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/newchild/>. Based on an exhibit held at the University of California–Berkeley and curated by James Steward, this site uses a variety of paintings to illustrate how many contemporary attitudes surrounding children emerged in Georgian England.

Do History: Martha Ballard’s Diary Online: <http://www.dohistory.org/>. Based on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer prize-winning book A Midwife’s Tale, this site, created by the Harvard Film Study Center, allows students to analyze midwife Martha Ballard’s diary, a valuable source for understanding social history of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century rural New England. The diary sheds light on household economies, medical practices, and sexual mores.

Mothers in Uncle Tom’s America: <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA97/riedy/>. Created by Maureen E. Riedy at the University of Virginia, this site examines how popular novels, essays, and poems treated mother-child relations during the mid nineteenth century.

Scholarship on Southern Farms and Plantations: <http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/slave.htm>. This site, created by George Washington University’s American Studies Program for the National Park Service, provides succinct information on The Architecture and Material Culture of Slavery, Slave Family and Domestic Life, and Slave and Free Black Communities in the South, accompanied by up-to-date bibliographies.

Slave Family Life: <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASseparation.htm>. This British online encyclopedia has succinct essays, accompanied by primary source excerpts, describing family life under slavery.

End of the Oregon Trail: <http://www.endoftheoregontrail.org/biomenu.html>. This site contains diaries, photographs, and biographical records documenting the pioneering experience, mainly along the Oregon and California Trails. It includes African American pioneers and settlers in the Pacific Northwest.

Roots in the Sand: <http://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/>. This companion site to the PBS documentary contains archival and family photographs, personal and public documents, and outtakes to offer a multigenerational portrait of pioneering Punjabi-Mexican families who settled, a century ago, in Southern California’s Imperial Valley.

“The Public Be Damned”: A Thematic and Multiple Intelligences Approach to Teaching the Gilded Age: <http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/gilded/cantuarticle.htm>. This lesson plan and handouts created by Nina Mjagkij and D. Antonio Cantu and featured in the Summer 1999 OAH Magazine of History uses an 1884 study by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics to detail the economic status and living environment of laboring families in Chicago.

A Tenement Story: <http://www.tenement.org/story.html>. This site, created by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, examines the lives of immigrant families that lived at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan.

Hard Times: Coping With Life During the Great Depression, 1929-1941: <http://www.spa3.k12.sc.us/broome/ht.htm>. Coordinated by Anne Pillow and Sheila Oliver of Broome High School in Spartenburg, South Carolina, this project features student interviews of individuals who remember life during the Great Depression.

What Did You do in the War, Grandma? <http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/tocCS.html>. This site, which documents the disruptions that war brought to family life on the homefront, contains oral histories of Rhode Island women during World War II that were collected by students in the South Kingstown (Rhode Island) Honors English Program, accompanied by essays by teachers and professional historians.

Family Album Project: Masumi Hayashi Photography: <http://www.csuohio.edu/art_photos/famalbum/famalbum.html>. An online album of pictures documents the daily lives of Japanese-American families in American and Canadian internment camps during World War II.

Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb: <http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/>. Created by Peter Bacon Hales of the Art History Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Levittown includes photographs and text documenting the paradigmatic postwar American suburb and its families.

Child Welfare Review (online): <http://www.childwelfare.com/kids/news.htm>.

Family Relations: <http://www.iog.wayne.edu/FR/homepage.html>.

The History of the Family: An International Quarterly: <http://www.public.iastate.edu/~quarterly/>.

Journal of Divorce and Remarriage: <http://www. haworthpressinc.com/>.

Journal of Family History: <http://www.sagepub.com/>.

Journal of Family Issues: <http://www.sagepub.com/>.

Journal of Marriage and the Family: <http://www.ume.maine.edu/~JMF/>.

Marriage and Family Review: <http://www. haworthpressinc.com/>.

Ethnic Images in Toys & Games: <http://www.balchinstitute.org/toys/toys.html>; Ethnic Weddings in America: <http://www.balchinstitute.org/wedding/Wedding.html>; and Rites of Passage in America: <http://www.balchinstitute.org/rites/rites.html>. These sites, based on exhibitions held in the Museum of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, document ethnic diversity in play patterns, marriage practices, and family rituals in American history.

Family, by David Herlihy: <http://www.theaha.org/info/AHA_History/dherlihy.htm>. David Herlihy’s presidential address at the American Historical Association’s 1990 annual meeting examines the emergence of the family in the West as a unit sharply differentiated from extended kin and community.

Family Discussions: Resources for Family Sociology: <http://www.familydiscussions.com/>. This site contains detailed summaries of noteworthy works, organized by authors, titles, topics, and keywords; an extensive bibliography of recent books on the family; and statistical charts and commentary summarizing recent family trends.

A Historical Dictionary of Terms in Family History: <http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~baxter/hist381/webpage.htm>. This online glossary of key concepts, terms, and individuals in the history of the family was created by students in an undergraduate history course of Douglas C. Baxter at Ohio University.

The History of Education and Childhood: <http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/>. This extensive archive of source materials explores the history of education and the history of childhood.

In Search of a Golden Age, by Stephanie Coontz: <http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC21/Coontz.htm>. Evergreen College professor Stephanie Coontz offers a succinct look at families throughout U.S. history and argues against the idea that there was ever a “golden age” of the family.

The Changing Family: How Changes in the Family Reflect Social and Economic Changes in Society: <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1990/4/90.04.08.x.html>.

The Inuit Family: <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1991/2/91.02.07.x.html>.

Literature As A Mirror of Reality: The Family In Historical and Sociological Perspectives: <http://130.132.143.21/ynhti/curriculum/units/1986/1/86.01.05.x.html>.

Stepping Into A Colonial Family, A Primary Student’s Perspective of Colonial Crafts, Customs and Traditions: <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1989/5/89.05.02.x.html>. These classroom-tested lesson plans were created by teachers participating in seminars sponsored by the Yale-New Haven Teachers’ Institute. These curriculum units, many of which contain primary sources, illustrate how themes in the history of the family can be brought into the classroom.

Steven Mintz is the senior associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. His books include Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1988), coauthored with Susan Kellogg