Family mourning after war and disaster in twentieth-century Britain.

Foster, Ann-Marie

Abstract

Across the twentieth century, after war and disaster, families were left to make sense of deaths of their members, and navigate newfound grief. This book is concerned with those who died in war or disaster in Britain across the first four decades of the twentieth century and their memorial legacy. The families of these dead were often denied access to a body, and choice over burial rights, all while dealing with an increased amount of death-based bureaucracy. The domestic memorials that they created took on additional meaning because of this lack of agency elsewhere. Family reactions to these mass death events tell a history which emphasizes how families were able to push against memorial narratives and create ephemera and objects to help mourn. Although the ways that these families were bereaved took place in different circumstances, the ways that families grieved were recognizable to one another. They drew on common memorial practices, augmented to take on special meaning after sudden death. This memorial material provided a vehicle for families to navigate their loss, but also to communicate the memory of the dead both externally, through donation to museums, and linearly, through ancestral lines. How this nuance was internally articulated inside and outside of the family created powerful memory cultures, which grew apart as the century continued.

Citation

FOSTER, A.-M. 2024. Family mourning after war and disaster in twentieth-century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press [online]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191968129.001.0001

• Book Type: Monograph
• Online Publication Date: Jul 22, 2024
• Publication Date: Aug 27, 2024
• Deposit Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 23, 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISBN: 9780192872005
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191968129.001.0001
• Keywords: First World War; Death; Family history; Museums; Ephemera
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2372837
• Contract Date: Feb 24, 2022