From the Family Album to the Digital Archive: Evolving Identity Practices in French Canadian Family Photos

Sarah Hurlburt, Whitman College

This paper will examine family photographs as an identity practice in two French Canadian and one Métis family in the western United States at the turn of the 20th century. Group photos and family albums are curated statements of relationship, revealing (or concealing) kin and community structures through their creation, composition, circulation, and preservation, both internally and as a publicly accessible document in a digital archive. We will examine the identity function of the family photo and the family album at each of these stages of its existence through research into archives of family correspondence, genealogical records, and descendant oral history. Through the Bergevin family letters, we will examine the exchange of portraits over distance as a practice of virtual presence, intentionally resisting the separation of migration. Through the Sauvé-Riel families of Moxee, Washington we will look at the family portrait as a carefully constructed genealogical representation of patriarchal descendance. Through the Lavadour family photos, we will examine the practice and representation of extended family relationships and community identity. In each case, we will consider how the triple functional frame of author, intent, and audience shift across the lifetime of the image. Finally, we will discuss the potential for collaboratively generated metadata to function as a pathway home for community members rather than an extractive process. Specifically, we will discuss the post-custodial archival practice informing the creation of the Métis Family Photos archive, a digital collection at the Whitman College and Northwest Archives in Walla Walla, WA. (bit.ly/lavadour)

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 46. Canadian Migration to the US, 1850-1930:New Studies Mixing Scales and Approaches