Ego Documents Entered Migration History

Abstract

Current knowledge of migration in history comes mainly from quantitative sources such as census birthplace data, registration records, ship passenger records, or journeymen registers. Although census data give a continuous record of both when and where people moved to, such sources provide very little contextual information to explain why some individuals take the opportunity to leave, while others in the same locality, class, and occupation do not. As Dirk Hoerder (1996, 217) has reminded us, the general economic, social, and political forces we use to explain international migrations seem quite plausible when applied to regions and masses of people, but markedly less so when we consider the individual, whose motivations might be much more complicated than the sum of push and pull forces taken into consideration. Since quantitative analyses will only result in a partial picture of migration cultures in past societies, scholars have begun to incorporate into their analyses more qualitative documents such as diaries, letters, testaments, and various others. In addition, oral history has also gained important methodologi-cal currency in migration studies. As historians increasingly began to base their studies on different kinds of individual narratives, along with the growing interest in history from below, starting in the 1970s, they were astonished by the amount of documents available for the study of both contemporary and modern history. In short, people wrote a lot, and writing was important not only for understanding their individual stories but also for purposes of communication. In the widest sense, ego documents are sources