Living with the Dead: Professor Laura King on her new book

This book ended up being so much fun to write, after a lot of false starts. I had lots of different versions of what the book would look like in my head, all of which were abandoned until I settled on the idea of focusing in on the fifteen families that form the core of this book, rather than trying to cover hundreds of families through archival research. The book is based on a collaborative project with a group of family historians, and in the end, the book is all about their histories, as well as that of my own family. 

I was surprised about how rich families’ cultures of remembering the dead are. One family I worked with, for example, had kept hold of the school case and school books which had belonged to a little boy, Harold, who had died in Leeds in 1931, from appendicitis. Nearly a hundred years later, that family still treasured these objects and wanted to ‘keep alive’ the memory of this little boy who had so sadly died at a young age. You can read more about this in ‘Remembering Deceased Children in Family Life: The School Case of Poor Harold (1920–31)’, History Workshop Journal, 93.1 (2022), 225-44, available open access through the journal’s website.

My approach is always about ‘ordinary’ people, to use a loaded term, so I try to find out about everyone and anyone, about all sorts of different families, whose lives aren’t always captured in conventional archives. Every one of those families and individuals within them deserve to be known about. I sometimes describe this project as being about the story-telling grandmas, aunts, and uncles that almost every family has. The front cover is an image of my own paternal grandmother: a working-class woman, originally from Ballymoney in Ireland, a part-time cleaner, a mother of six. Just the sort of woman whose history isn’t always seen as important!

The key thing my book demonstrates is how important the dead are: how relatives and ancestors who have died continue to influence family life long after they’re gone, through the stories that are told about them, the objects we might still hold onto that previously belonged to another relative, in the way we understand who are families are.