Family history

“ The history of any private family, however humble, could it be fully related for five or six generations, would illustrate the state and progress of society better than could be done by the most elaborate dissertation. ”

“ It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. ”

“ Whole families have come. One whole family we see clearly, of three generations: the father picking, the mother shovelling, the young ones wheeling assiduous; old grandfather, hoary with ninety-three years, holds in his arms the youngest of all: [297] frisky, not helpful this one ”

“ The history of the development of family life is the history of the process (a) by which family rights have come to be regarded as independent of the special custom of a clan and the special laws of a state, as rights which all men and women, as such, are entitled to. ”

“ The Domestic Function of the Family.—The farm family for the purpose of study may be thought of as composed of husband and wife, children and servants, but the makers of the family are of first importance for its understanding. The family has a long history, but it exists, not because it is a long-established institution, but because it satisfies present human needs, as all institutions must if [27] they are to survive. ”

“ The family.—Origin and history of the family.—The family originating in the necessity of the perpetuation of the species, has gradually gained in morality until it has reached the present state, namely, monogamy, or marriage between one man and one woman: a progress so far as the dignity of woman and the equality of the sexes are concerned. ”

“ Many volumes have been written upon the history of marriage, or rather of the family, since, as one historian justly puts it, "marriage has its source in the family rather than the family in marriage." [2] In all these studies the influence of law, of custom, of self-interest, and of economic pressure, is shown to have molded the institution of marriage into curious shapes and forms, some grievous to be borne. ”

“ Traces of a similar evolution of the family may, I am convinced, be found by all who will undertake an inquiry for themselves. The subject is one of great interest. So far as my own study goes, I believe that these survivals of the maternal-group customs may be discovered in the early history of every people, where the necessary material for such knowledge is available. ”

“ The consideration of the house and its parts and furniture, and of the outward forms of domestic life, leads us naturally to that of the constitution of the family. It was the chief pride of the aristocratic class to live very extravagantly, and to support a great household, with an immense number of personal attendants of different classes. In the first place the old system of fostering, which was kept up to a comparatively late period, added to the number of the lord’s or knight’s family. ”

“ Everywhere we find the tribes or clans composed of several families, the42 members of each family being more closely connected with one another than with the rest of the tribe. The family, consisting of parents, children, and often also their next descendants, is a universal institution among existing peoples.204 And it seems extremely probable that, among our earliest human ancestors, the family formed, if not the society itself, at least the nucleus of it. ”

“ Whatever be their nature,—whether it be true or not that in all cases they are the worship of some mythical ancestor,—they are everywhere113 employed to attest the sacredness of the family-relation; and therefore they acquire prominent significance and importance, whenever the continuous existence of the Family is endangered by a change in the person of its chief. ”

“ On the other hand, the persons theoretically amalgamated into a family by their common descent are practically held together by common obedience to their highest living ascendant, the father, grandfather, or great-grandfather. ”

“ This is a remarkable phenomenon, and, as is well206 known, occurs also very frequently, though in a less degree, in human families. Every one of my readers doubtless knows some members of a family who, in this or that peculiarity, much more resemble the grandfather or grandmother than the father or mother. ”

“ When, through causes which will be noticed later in this work, property began to accumulate in the149 hands of men, children became the recognized heirs of their fathers and the foundation for the present form of the family was laid. ”

“ The family, which the fiercest blasts of the revolutionary tempest in the last century had left untouched, is, in our day, radically assailed in its two essential foundations, marriage and inheritance. ”

“ If a kingdom be, as Imlac tells us, a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions. ”

“ In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father's house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ The sons bred in such a family will be moral men, of steady habits; and the daughters, if the mother shall have performed the duties of a parent in the superintendence of their education, as faithfully as she has done those of a wife, will each be a treasure to her husband ”

“ When sons encourage father, the family seems to be prosperous,
And it likely to be accomplish’d, when the youngers strengthen elders.
153. While two ploughs set up, family is harmoniz’d,
When a household is to be ruin’d, keeping two wives. ”

“ What are the original forms of the human family? Did man begin by being monogamous or polygamous, but, in either case, the master of his own home and the assured central point of his family relations? ”

“ The family has been in the past, and is still, the great conserving agency in human society, preserving and transmitting from generation to generation both the material and spiritual possessions of the race. ”

“ According to tradition, the first mother of the family is said to have been a field worker who, by resting on the cultivated ground, became pregnant and brought forth a son. And it was this son who founded the numerous and hardy family for whom all things prospered. The most peculiar characteristic of the Man family in him was that everything he touched became full of life and throve. ”

“ And in countries where certain colors distinguish certain families, and are hereditary, so to say, it is convenient and pleasant to recognize a coat-of-arms, or a livery, and to know that the representative of a great and famous family is passing by. ”

“ In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks, was the victim of the change from one system to the other. ”

“ In certain persons again—especially in members of an Family or Clan aristocratic caste or in others who are able to trace their descent through a long line of ancestors—some important aspects of the parent-love come to be attached to the idea of the whole family of which they form a part ”

“ In the marriage system which has prevailed in our world for several thousand years, a certain hierarchy, or sacred order in authority, has throughout been recognised. The family has been regarded as a small State of which the husband and father is head. ”

“ Think of a large family of noble children, of all ages, from the little child to the young man beginning his business career, returning after long severance to spend a season together in the old ancestral home, situated in its far-reaching grounds, and you can form some idea of what it will be, when the whole Family of the Redeemed gather in the Father's house. ”

“ In our own country, families are usually small, parents and their immediate offspring, with the attendants and belongings which naturally gather to a household, and, let it not be forgotten, form part of the family. ”

“ We regard the family—one father, one mother, a group of children to be fed, clothed, and educated during the years that precede maturity—as the fundamental institution of our civilization and the glory, thus far, of all social evolution. ”

“ Family education. No doubt the folkways about kinship are produced in connection with views about interests, and in connection with faiths about procreation, and impressions produced by experience. The mother and children live in constant contact and intimacy. The family grows into an institution which takes its nature from the traditional and habitual behavior of its members to each other in daily life. ”

“ They are called religious families because they are an image of the natural family, and because of that, the founders are called father or mother by their disciples. And so, even for this spiritual generation, the influence of woman is needed. ”

“ The house must have its head, the family their father; the knowledge of that father's will is the truth which rests upon the family as its support and pillar. Outside of the family that knowledge may be lost, together with the will to obey the father and to love him; but within it is a living tradition, "familiar to the ear as household words." ”

“ If we examine our terms of relationship, we find that those applied to individual persons and those used in a narrow and well-defined sense are just those in which the family is intimately concerned. The terms father, mother, husband and wife, brother and sister, are limited to members of the family of the speaker, and the terms father-, mother-, brother-, and sister-in-law to the members of the family of the wife or husband in the same narrowly restricted sense. ”

“ At any rate, just as many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all their younger children in the hands of the mother. ”

“ The family consists, we will say, of father and mother, and children. Here is a man and a woman, then, bound together by the relation of marriage. The children are related to the parents as offspring. The children are related to one another as brothers and sisters. Altogether they are one and they are many. There is unity and there is difference. ”

“ They conceal only distresses and cares: and the father of the family, solely occupied with the advancement, rather than the Christian education of his offspring, leaves to them, for inheritance, his agitations and disquiets, which they, in their turn, shall one day transmit to their descendants. ”

“ In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters—for in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere, while the young women stay at home—instead of the original single family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of families, closely united by kinship. ”

“ Every household has its particular gods and protectors—the ancestors thus sublimated, and the master of the family, the prospective god. The condition beyond the grave in no way depends on conduct during life, it is determined by the descendants. ”

“ You must remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger son or daughter ”

“ And again it is not strange, when we realize that hundreds of generations lie back of both parents, and innumerable ancestors of both father and mother contribute their different mentalities to the children in a family. ”

“ In a true family circle a father and a mother first clasp each other's hands, liking well to be thus clasped; then they stretch out a hand on either side, and these are speedily grasped by children, who hold one another firmly, and complete the ring. ”

“ In considering these literate definitions, we can see that they apply to the situation of the current traditional family as well, in which father and mother both work, in which a child may live with and be cared for by a parent's second or third spouse, in which distance from or lack of blood relations calls for ad hoc relatives. ”

“ On the death of his father the eldest son becomes the head of the family, responsible for all the duties of a father towards his brothers and sisters, who receive no share in the patrimony, but merely dowries and donations on marriage, &c. Between the various members of a family, even after they have separated from the domestic hearth, there remains the greatest intimacy and affection ”