Beyond the Family and the Household: Occupational Family Networks

Abstract

Although families and kinship have been studied extensively from a historical perspective, less attention has been paid to their significance and role in the formation of local social networks.This study makes use of extensive Finnish records of godparentage to map local networks to analyze the factors (kinship, work relations, neighborhood, friendship) that influenced their formation. It argues that, in the context of a closed industrial community, occupation and kinship were the major cornerstones of these networks. Only after work-related inequality was slowly eliminated in the early twentieth century did kinship begin to gain ground as the main influencing factor.