Treasure or Trouble: The Impact of Inherited Artifacts on Family Communication

Abstract

This case study examines family artifacts as communicative of family history. I am particularly interested in determining the positionality of the artifact: Does the artifact tell the family story, or does it become the story? Using autoethnography, narrative inheritance, memory, and family story to investigate inherited artifacts passed on in my own family, this case study uses treasured family pieces as a pathway of communicating family narrative and identity. This case study follows the trail of two inherited artifacts within my own family: an antique table passed from my great-grandmother to my paternal grandmother to me, and various china pieces once belonging to my great-grandmother that are now in the possession of two cousins-once-removed. The table works to shape the recent family communication, as it represents a source of tension between my uncle and I over the division of my grandmother’s possessions upon her death. The China tells a more distant story that shapes our global and extended family narrative, reaching back to loss during the Great Depression and coming full circle back into our family’s possession in the mid-2000s.