Book presentation ‘Selling Ancestry. Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth Century Britain’ (OUP, 2023)

Discussants: Joanne Innes (Somerville College, Oxford University) and Henry French (Exeter University)

Convened by François-Joseph Ruggiu (Maison française d’Oxford)

With this study of eighteenth-century family directories, Dr. Jettot reconsiders of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widespread commercialization across the eighteenth century. These directories replaced the expensive, locally-produced, early modern artefacts (tombs, windowpanes, illuminated pedigrees), and began to reach a wide audience of readers in the British Isles and the colonies. From the first Peerage in 1709 to the guidebooks of Debrett’s and Burke’s in the 1830s, Stéphane Jettot offers an insight into the cumulative process leading to the creation of these hybrid products — a combination of court almanacs, county histories, and town directories. Employed by contemporaries as reference tools to navigate through a dynamic and changing society, they could be used as a means to probe contemporary attitudes towards social status and political events. Published by the most prominent London booksellers who shared their copyrights among themselves, they relied on the considerable involvement of thousands of families in the counties.