Living with the Dead: Memories, Histories, and the Stories Families Tell in Modern Britain

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

The dead are everywhere in family life. From a great-grandmother’s recipe made time and again, to a dog-eared black-and-white photo of a family on a beach, and from a carefully curated family bible to a much-told story of a family fleeing their home many decades ago, families are made by their pasts. This book examines the relationship between the living and the dead within family life, charting the way families create afterlives for their ancestors. It asks who and what gets to be remembered, and why.

Considering different points of connection with the dead in each chapter--through graves, homes, things, photos, writing, research, and stories--this book demonstrates how death and the dead remain a crucial presence within family life. Through an innovative methodology of collaborative critical family history, Living with the Dead features interviews, personal archives, and the results of a collaboration with fifteen family historians, including the author’s own family. What results is a unique way of exploring family pasts, of charting not only how families have remembered their dead and passed on their histories over time, but the mechanisms of how histories are constructed and shared.

Living with the Dead reveals how crucial the dead and stories of them are within families, and provides new ways for historians to unpick the way history is intimately made.

Laura King, Professor of Collaborative History, University of Leeds

Laura King is a historian of families, of the intimate worlds behind the closed doors, and the emotional relationships between relatives. Having worked on the history of fatherhood (Family Men, OUP, 2015), her research has turned towards inter-generational relationships between the living and the dead, and the very processes of how history gets made in the private spaces of family life. She has published in many journals, including History Workshop Journal and the Journal of Family History, and throughout her career has worked with numerous partners and groups outside of universities, such as museums, charities, family historians, and artists. She is Professor of Collaborative History, University of Leeds.