Property, Progeny, and Emotion: Family History in a Leonese Village

Abstract

This article considers, from the historical, demographic, and anthropological points of view the various forms that the Leonese peasant family takes during its development cycle, and demonstrates the importance of extended and multiple family households in an area long characterized by partible inheritance and nuclear family households. Two methods of doing family history, at times held incompatible, are used and are shown to be complementary: a structural analysis of households, based on four household lists from 1920 to 1978, and on demographic data from 1739 to 1978; and an interpretive analysis of the lived reality of the Leonese household, based on ethnographic data and on locally held notions of proper relations between kin, as embedded in stories people tell about family histories.