The past is another country, and all the more so when it actually transpires in another country.  When writing one’s own family history, the problem of identification with the subject matter seems trivial, but in fact building bridges between one’s own subjective pulsations and one’s family’s past is complicated by the fact that those pasts are set in places and times with which one has little familiarity. In this paper I raise the question of authorial identification with collective processes of the past, when one is writing one’s own family history.

What is the value of a private archive? Through the analysis of a family archive, Julia Pabon’s autobiographical notebook, I try to emphasize the importance a private archive can have on various levels: personal, historical and theoretical. In this study, I demonstrate that this act of writing was for Julia not only a way to construct a representation of herself, but also a way to make her descendants understand the features of a vanished world, and the impact that had the trials and tribulations she experienced. Her life, heavily impacted by the Spanish Civil War, conditioned the appearance of a particular narrative.

As a member of the family, I am responsible for cultivating my grandmother’s memory, therefore my empathic relationship with the archive is ambiguous. It raises the question of the objectivity of the researcher who happens to also be the recipient of the archive. This kind of document calls both for an emotional engagement and for reflection. As an historian, I must bring a more critical look, investigate a discourse on the real, and rationally confront it with the historical events to compose a narrative that is able to see her as an historical subject. I explain that this document belongs to a vernacular version of a collective memory considering the anonymous and those whom history has forgotten. Finally, my objective is to demonstrate how this kind of material has become a valuable source for a researcher in various academic fields and this study helps continue, as Marlene Manoff highlights in her analysis of the archival discourse,: “a broadly interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of the archive”.