I want to understand what it means to have family roots in a place that was charted by imperialism, built by settler-colonialism, and marked by exploitation. Using the emerging framework of ‘critical family history’, combined with the interdisciplinary methodologies of co-production, storytelling, and archival research, this project aims to disrupt the nostalgic registers of settler-colonial belonging, and produce new and useable histories for the present.

Family history and genealogy has been said to have ‘twisted roots’ in white supremacism and imperialism, but it is also the most common way people engage with and make their own histories. This award will support my research into my own family’s place in settler-colonial history and enable me to write an entangled history of individual ancestors that illuminates the wider history of the North Atlantic colonial world. The project also aims to empower family historians to tell ‘new stories’ about their families that challenge top-down narratives of imperial and racial belonging; and to develop new ways of understanding our twisted roots and troubled inheritances. 

Britain’s oldest colony, the Island of Newfoundland, will make for a complex and nuanced case study. The island is home to a historically marginalized white settler population who have a profound sense of belonging in place; but it is also the site of the near-total destruction of an indigenous culture. This project, which will reckon with these tensions, will be informed by work that aims to ‘decolonize’ imperial spaces, anthropological and geographical work on place-making, new trends in genealogical research and practice, and Atlantic world history. This project aims to discover what new stories a more critical kind of family history might generate, how it may help illuminate the harms and silences of colonialism, and how it could be used to forge a new sense of belonging and place.