Approaches to Life Story Analyses of Multigenerational Hungarian Worker Families in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The main aim of the research project, that also includes this paper, is the investigation of the social history of Hungarian factory workers from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century in the case of Ózd, a small industrial city in northeast Hungary. For the purpose of this research the author uses not only the traditional historical and statistical sources and methods, but family history, personal history, and life story approaches too. The basic sources of the research are the registers of births, marriages, and deaths, and various kinds of family history and life story interviews. From this material, the author reconstructs a multigenerational worker family life story. Families were one of the determining groups of the Hungarian working class in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The major questions of the research and paper are the following: How is it possible to reconstruct the life stories of ordinary families and people? How can this reconstruction help us gain a deeper insight into the stratification and the internal power/hierarchical structures of the factory and local society? The first part of the study is an outline of the history of the factory and the settlement. The second part reconstructs and analyzes a typical multigenerational family history as a case study. Finally, the article investigates the process of socialization of multigenerational worker families. Through this analysis the author introduces and characterizes the main elements of the value system and the most typical patterns of social behavior of this section of Hungarian workers from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.