An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries by Emma Rothschild

(Princeton University Press, 2021)

Review by Ruth A Symes

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[This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine UK]

Behind the silent records of family history, the past is noisy. Our ancestors were not individuals living in isolation, but members of ever-changing social networks who shared news and information with the many people who lived around them and (through the networks of those people) with the world beyond.  Rothschild’s study of the networks around an unknown and illiterate French woman, Marie Aymard, in the obscure provincial town of Angouleme in the years leading up to the French Revolution, examines this proposition in fascinating detail.  

Making prolific use of archival sources, the investigation spins first around 83 townsfolk who came together one December afternoon in 1764 to witness a prenuptial agreement.  The largely familial and neighbourly network, broadens to include the next ring of social contacts in other parts of the town and country, and then moves out further still to include contacts who operated in other parts of the world, but had links back to Angouleme. Academics would describe the time dimension of this kind of history as ‘flat’ or ‘horizontal,’ but Rothschild also introduces a ‘vertical’ component by tracing some families on into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Even amateur family historians will speculate on what they might learn by similarly scrutinising the networks around their own ancestors; the possibilities are truly ‘infinite’.