Släktforskning och identitetsskapande
The purpose of this thesis is to examine how genealogists create identity through their own research, and how they live with their ancestors in the everyday life. The questions at issue are: How do genealogists deal with concepts like ?native home district?, ?heritage? and ?family?. Does it exist a problem in creating identity and how genealogists regard other people with a different background, for instance immigrants. This thesis consists of three parts: in the first I present my aim, questions at issue, my method with qualitative interviews, and my theoretical frame from sociology and anthropology. The second part consists of the results given from my interviews with my eleven genealogists from Uddevalla and Trollhättan. In the third and last part a discussion from the empirical and theoretical information from earlier in the thesis is made. Genealogists often ?lives? close with their ancestors through their results of family history studies. I can se them as narratives in their minds. Hardly any person starts genealogical research to receive an identity. Most of them will anyhow be influenced by their studies in some way. Almost every person interviewed by me did not think that their identity had changed since they started genealogical research.