Kinship Collation: Trends in 19th Century UK kinship networks evidenced from rural Aberdeenshire

This thesis presents kinship collation a social history tool that can reveal the sense of community as experienced by past individuals from the mapping of their networks with related people across landscapes, social institutions and economic activity. The tool was developed from a doctoral project that worked from the interdisciplinary scholarly space created by modern, digitised genealogical endeavour and synergises methodological theories with processes that can repurpose the British-sphere record base of enumeration returns and population records.

The thesis challenges the longstanding belief that British data does not carry information on the kinship behaviours of nineteenth-century actors; instead, it reveals that the data has been intentionally and unintentionally hidden. It has taken the development of improved accessibility, enhanced visualisation and data management technology combined with a specific theorisation of kinship to reveal the varied kinship connectivity that ran through society influenced in form by socioeconomic currents. The thesis, therefore, asserts that British orthodoxy on kinship has fallen behind the theoretical discussions on the nature of kinship as mutuality and reciprocity between actors as it manifests in European cultures. The discourse follows an anthropological argument that not all relatives, even close ones are automatically kin, aligned to a hypothesis that kinship is not limited to the private world of the domestic co-residency.

The importance of kinship collation to map the lived community and identify kinship is amplified from a Scottish region; the sprawl of kinship is tracked as it was sustained across continents, over many decades and passed between generations. The networks are analysed for indicators of social forces that operated through the structures of the modern world, democracy, liberal values and capitalist structures and as individual social capital that stabilised women and men in their situations.