Instead of focusing on historical dates, locations and verifiable events, this area of study looks at the unique stories, customs, and handicrafts that define the family as a distinct social group.
In 1996, American folklorist Barre Toelken wrote: For an individual family, folklore is its creative expression of a common past.
As raw experiences are transformed into family stories, expression, and photos, they are codified in forms which can easily be recalled, retold, and enjoyed.
The transmission of individual stories and customs within a family depends for the most part upon the personality, character and lifestyle of its members.
An obvious area of gender-related transmission is seen in the kitchen, where food preparation and mealtime customs have historically been performed by women.
One common example of this practice is described by Thomas Adler in the article "Making Pancakes on Sunday: The Male Cook in Family Tradition".
Therefore, items such as newspaper clippings on arrests, photographs of estranged members, stories of infidelities, or papers about a dishonorable discharge from military service often are not saved.
Using taped interviews, representative pieces were published in the book A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Traditions from the Smithsonian Collection.
Seasoned with time and re-telling, the story gets revised to express specific values and character treasured family traits.
According to one family's story, the prospective bride had to untie all the knots in a string to demonstrate her care and diligence.
[15] Another family tells how the young couple was stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel when he proposed, and she had either to say yes or jump.
[16] Given time and repetition, the anecdotes serve to shape the overall family story, populating it with real individuals and historical events that are made personal.
At some point in the cleanup, usually, after the best dishes had been washed and put away, the mother would bring out a bottle of schnapps to help complete the work.
In one family, the saying "… good worker, very strong" signifies that the speaker wants to come along, and would be a valuable addition to the planned undertaking.
[19] Family archival material can take many forms, including papers, news clippings, photographs, letters, notes, journals, and receipts.
The materials are passed along until they are either thrown out in a move, destroyed in a fire, or find an owner within the family[9] who has the interest and time to curate them.
While certificates authenticate the dates and events' history, letters and journals can reveal the character and thoughts of individual family members.
Similar to photographs, letters and journal entries document individual moments in the life of a family member.
The rapid evolution of personal digital storage media (from magnetic tape to magnetic disks to optical disks to flash drives and the cloud has meant that many digital documents of recent vintage are inaccessible because the technology to access them is no longer available.
One major area of family traditions revolves around food, spanning cultivation, procurement, preparation, serving, eating and cleanup.
Assumptions about how this occurs—who does what and when—are challenged when the established process (i.e. family custom) hits a snag: we've run out of rice or someone ate the last of the olives.
"[25] The Smithsonian Folklife Festival takes place annually on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to exhibit and demonstrate crafts and customs of diverse ethnic, regional and occupational groups.
Each exhibit endeavors to move beyond the items of tangible culture, the arts and objects we can touch, feel and put in a glass case.
Each performance or display articulates the goal of the Smithsonian Institution to spread its reach beyond material objects to artifacts of intangible cultural heritage.
Instead of displaying or performing recognized traditions, its goal was to collect items of family folklore from visitors.
Representative pieces were then published in the book A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Traditions from the Smithsonian Collection.
Each of these is supported by various institutions of public folklore, with the goal of displaying traditions of regional, ethnic and occupational folk groups.
Folklore's content varies from ethnographical and analytical essays on popular religion and belief, language, arts and crafts to reviews, analysis and debate on a wide range of adjacent disciplines.
These awards established the importance of oral histories and traditions as a bona fide tool of historical and cultural research.
Special projects reach out to targeted populations to fulfill StoryCorps' commitment to record a diverse array of voices.