Konflikt, kogemus ja nostalgia perep rimuses Eesti ja Soome n itel

The need to know one's ancestry has been justified by mythical, legal, as well as scientific explanations. But why do we discuss it and write about it in the modern society?We must search for the reasons for our interest in family heritage in the common elements of the earlier tradition and new forms of culture. Therefore, there is no need to study merely oral narratives, or separate them strictly from heritage in written form.The current article centres on the purpose of family heritage at the end of the 20th century, based on the structure of family narratives in two written sources. The manuscripts were taken from the Estonian collection entitled Eesti Elulood (EE), [Estonian Life Stories] available in the Estonian Archives of Cultural History in the Estonian Museum of Literature, and from the Finnish collection Suvun suuri kertomus (SSK) [The Great Family History] available in the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archives in Helsinki. Nearly 1,500 of the total of 20,000 pages of the first collection (Life stories of the Estonians submitted for the 1996 collection contest The Fate of Me and My Close Ones in the Course of History ) and approximately 1,300 pages of the total of 40,000 of the other (the outcome of the 1997 Finnish national contest for collecting family heritage) were covered for the present article. As to the Estonian manuscripts the selection was based on the contents of heritage (the collection focuses on life stories, and therefore does not contain accounts about ancestry and the life of ancestors); as to the Finnish material I tended to give priority to narratives about peasant ancestries, as it seemed to comply best with the selected Estonian material.The narrators were mainly from village communities, although nowadays they may be settled in towns. The majority of them were born during the period between the two world wars. Written narratives reflect an opposition between the stability and harmony and the crisis after WW2. The reason for it is objective due to the life of the generation under discussion and ongoing historical events. In the 1920s-1930s, today's narrators-respondents were young children. This period is often characterised as a period of stability and security, followed by a very critical change in society. In Estonia, people's lives were interrupted by war and political reforms, which ran to the extremes with the arrests and deportations in 1941 and 1949. In Finland, life was affected by the war, emigration from Karelia due to the re-establisment of Russian borders; the most significant change was associated wit