Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Stéphane Jettot, "Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration 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. In Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Stéphane Jettot offers an insight into the cumulative process leading to the creation of these hybrid products — a combination of court...