Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth Century Britain

Studies of primary sources are often very useful to students and historians working with those types of source material but lack the bite of more weighty studies. Stèphane Jettot’s volume manages to be both useful and engaging, adding to our knowledge of both the directories and of eighteenth-century Britain. Family directories are, as he rightly asserts, fascinating and important volumes, containing a wealth of information on elite families and, as he shows convincingly, a wider scope of history. He is also surely justified in suggesting that we know so very little about these documents because historians have sought to distance themselves from genealogical research. Family Directories shows that we should take far more notice of them. The directories of this period between the end of heraldic visitations in late seventeenth century and the development of nineteenth century genealogies, such as Burke’s and Debrett’s are even less well known. Yet it was in this period that family histories were published at a national level for the first time, allowing for a wider dissemination and engagement with them than functioned through the College of Arms. We are introduced to the varied uses that directories were put to in the past, the changing market for these volumes from the families with entries in them to middling sort antiquarians, the way in which directories cut across family belonging and relationships and the important political and satirical role that directories could have.