Abstract
This study examines how material objects sustain family relationships in contexts of displacement and disruption, focusing on two women in Sweden whose parents and grandparents fled Estonia during the Second World War. I investigate how materiality intertwines with memory and imagination, demonstrating that objects—even when their origins are unclear or initially unknown—possess mnemonic and imaginative qualities that help materialize stories and memories, fostering intergenerational continuity and belonging. The case study reveals that such adopted objects act as active agents of memory, enabling individuals to reconstruct disrupted family histories, affirm identity, and sustain continuity through imaginative and affective engagement. I propose that distinguishing between inherited and adopted objects provides a valuable lens for understanding how memory, identity, and materiality intersect in contexts marked by displacement, loss, and disruption. This study highlights that continuity and belonging are not only preserved through what is handed down but also actively constructed through engagement with material culture. My findings challenge the assumption that only inherited family objects can sustain kinship ties and memory, showing that adopted objects play a central role in reconstructing pasts and maintaining belonging across generations in contexts of disruption and dislocation.
Keywords
Introduction
Personal biographies and life stories are “embedded in things just as things are premising the biographies of people” (Mímisson, 2012: 455). Our experiences are shaped by materiality, by the environment in which we live and the things we possess and select to keep as well as by those things and places we leave behind or lose. Particularly in intergenerational relationships, objects and their practices are imbued with meanings and memory (Holmes, 2019). They can help us to continue traditions, evoke previous family experiences and remind us of the presence of family members and/or a home long gone. They become linked to processes of belonging (see Koskinen-Koivisto et al., 2024a). Experiences of material dispossession or displacement not only affect those who experience them firsthand, but memories of traumatic and transformative experiences can also be passed on to future generations in the family (see Hirsch, 1996). Memories of difficult family experiences in the past can lead to a feeling of discontinuity in personal processes of belonging and identity formation.
As part of a larger research project, 1 I examined the relationship between material objects, memories, and feelings of belonging in the context of difficult and transformative family memories. My research focused on a group of six women and three men whose parents and grandparents fled their home country Estonia, during the Second World War. I used a snowball sampling to select study participants. The oldest participant was born in Estonia in 1940 and the youngest in Sweden in 1982, with the majority of the study's participants being born in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s. They grew up with stories about the lives of their parents and grandparents in Estonia before the war and their experiences during the war and the occupations, which ultimately led to their escape to Sweden. Although (with one exception) the study participants were born many years after the war, the memories of their parents and grandparents still have an impact on them and contribute to a sense of discontinuity in their family relationships and belonging. I have a similar family background to the study participants and knew some of them personally before the research began. My Estonian mother and grandparents fled to Sweden in 1944 and I was born in Sweden in the 1970s. However, in contrast to the study participants, I come from a mixed Estonian-Lithuanian family and grew up in Germany. All interviews were conducted in Estonian and I am solely responsible for the translations of the interview excerpts in this article.
My research explored how second- and third-generation Swedish-Estonians engage with family histories shaped by displacement and war through stories, inherited objects, and cultural practices. The conversations revealed how memory, material culture, and notions of Estonianness intersected across generations, shaping belonging, language, and emotional ties to both people and places. They also reflected processes of postmemory (Hirsch, 1997), through which descendants engaged with the inherited memories and emotional legacies of previous generations. Family objects, both everyday items and symbolic keepsakes, often served as anchors of memory, mediating past and present, absence and belonging. Through close reading and thematic analysis of the interviews, I identified recurring themes and connections between objects and personal narratives. The entanglement of individual and object biographies revealed complex processes of remembering, evaluating, and negotiating meaning across diasporic and intergenerational contexts. These dynamics were particularly evident in the objects that participants kept in their homes and the meanings they attributed to them.
When I visited the study's participants, I found that they had similar types of objects at their homes, such as Estonian-language books, dictionaries, Estonian editions of the national epic Kalevipoeg, Estonian flags, and some even had traditional Estonian folkloric costumes. While these objects served to illustrate their Estonian cultural identity, they were also often considered as impersonal by their current owners, neither stimulating their imagination and reflection about the family past nor helping to maintain and strengthen intergenerational family ties. The items that the interviewees most associated with memories of their parents and grandparents were often purchased in Sweden after the war. Only very few objects had survived from the time when their parents and grandparents had fled Estonia. In this context, I became interested in the accounts of Piret and Mai. They each described a relationship to a specific object that they considered as a family heirloom from Estonia, although the origin of the object and its connection to their family remained unclear. Through their relationship with the object, they forged a deep connection to family members they had never met before.
In this article, I will limit my discussion to the two study's participants, Piret and Mai, to examine the role of objects in maintaining affective family relationships. While Piret and Mai allowed me to use their real names, the names, ages, and places of origin of their family members were partially anonymised at their request. My focus is on the ways in which objects, memory, and imagination are intertwined and help to establish belonging and continuity even in the context of difficult memories that shape family history.
Hirsch (1996) coined the concept of postmemory in relation to children of Holocaust survivors to describe how the memories of previous generations can impact the lives of subsequent generations. The concept describes a form of secondary memory that is passed on to the second generation through narratives of traumatic and transformative events and experiences that preceded their birth (Hirsch, 1996: 662). According to Hirsch (1996: 659), postmemory is “a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation”. Postmemory provides a valuable framework for understanding how the memories of traumatic and transformative family histories are transmitted across generations, shaping the imaginations and identities of descendants like Mai and Piret. At the same time, this article emphasizes the central role of human-object relationships in mediating and materializing these transmitted memories, showing how objects actively participate in the ongoing construction of family memory and belonging.
My discussion of the role of objects connects to recent social and cultural research on the relationship between materiality and kinship (e.g., Holmes, 2019; Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021; Kurpiel and Maniak, 2024). I draw on two concepts in my discussion. First, I apply Kurpiel and Maniak's (2024) concept of material kinship for understanding the specific relationship between objects and people. While Kurpiel and Maniak speak of adopted heritage, I find that the term ‘adopted family object’ better captures the emotional and affective significance that each object holds for Piret and Mai, respectively. Furthermore, I draw on the concept of material affinities coined by sociologist Holmes (2019) to understand how objects can express and maintain kin relationships and how materiality is linked to family memories and affective/emotional bonds between family members.
In their study, sociologist Anna Kurpiel and cultural anthropologist Katarzyna Maniak apply the concept of material kinship to material objects left behind by their German owners during the Second World War and then taken over by displaced Polish people who later settled in the former German homes. They examine how the process of kinship relations is mediated by initially unfamiliar material objects, which result in a re-evaluation of people's relationship with these objects. According to Kurpiel and Maniak (2024: 123–124), these objects can be perceived as mnemonic objects, which are closely linked to the selection of specific memories and relationships to establish emotional affinity and ties with people, places, and the past. Their findings suggest that the appropriation of the former German objects refers to an imaginary past rather than specific family bonds. Nevertheless, as Kurpiel and Maniak argue, the items can facilitate the process of belonging and strengthen their current owners’ affective ties to the past.
Holmes (2019) applies the concept of material affinities in her study of ordinary, everyday objects, such as clothing, furniture, and garden tools that were passed on between family members. She examines “how stories, memories and ideas of kin, both biological and social, are made material through objects in use” and how the objects’ material traces become physically and imaginatively inscribed into family relationships and networks. Her key argument is that objects can “reproduce, imagine and memorialise kin connections both biological and social, and in and through time” (Holmes, 2019: 187), by enabling people to feel deep connections in kin relationships, which are tied to an object's material and symbolic qualities.
In the following, I contextualise Piret's and Mai's family memories with their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences of the Second World War. Next, I introduce the object adopted by Piret and Mai, respectively. I discuss the ways in which they deepen bonds between family members and relate to family (post)memories by highlighting the objects’ mnemonic and imaginative qualities. My concluding discussion addresses the interplay of material and intangible links, of material objects, memory and imagination, for producing continuity and strengthening intergenerational family relationships.
Experiences of discontinuity and absence in Piret’s and Mai's family histories
Piret was born in 1957, and Mai was born in 1964 in Sweden to Estonian parents. They both experienced discontinuity in their family relationships and connections to Estonia as a result of the events of the Second World War. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Eastern Europe between them in a secret appendix to the ‘Treaty of Non-Aggression’ between Germany and the Soviet Union. This agreement resulted in three successive occupations of Estonia and the loss of about 20% of its pre-war population of 1 million citizens between 1940 and 1944. Soviet authorities killed the country's political and military elite and organized the first mass deportations of about 11,000 Estonians to gulag camps in Siberia shortly before the Germans invaded the country in 1941. Under the German occupation (1941–1944), the entire Jewish and Sinti minority was killed. Young Estonian men were forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht. Some joined volunteer Estonian units who fought on the side of the Finns in the Winter War. When the Red Army advanced again on Estonia in the fall of 1944, many thousands of Estonians fled their country for fear of the associated violence, repression, and deportations they had earlier witnessed. (See e.g., Weiss-Wendt, 2003; Perchoc, 2019; Taylor, 2020).
The family stories of Piret and Mai represent specific Baltic experiences of the Second World War that address family separation and loss due to war, deportation, and the mass exodus of 1944. Entire families and generations were torn apart: grandparents, parents, children, siblings, cousins, and friends. During the ‘golden days’ of the interwar period (Perchoc, 2019), the parents and grandparents of Piret and Mai belonged to the well-situated, educated upper middle-class in Estonia. Piret's parents (born in 1920 and 1922) were from a small town in southeastern Estonia, while Mai's parents were born in Tallinn in 1920 and 1929, respectively. The parents of Mai's mother were originally from a small town in the South-West of Estonia, but moved for professional reasons to Tallinn. Her grandmother worked for an international insurance company until she got married and her grandfather was a bank manager. Mai's other grandfather Karl was a high-ranking official to the Estonian government. One of Piret's grandfathers was a railway engineer and the other a school headmaster. Piret's mother Anu lost her parents shortly before the war, leaving her and her adult brothers orphans.
When the war started, Piret's parents Anu and Hindrek as well as Mai's father Aleksander were students at the University of Tartu. After his father Karl was arrested by Soviet authorities, Aleksander joined an Estonian volunteer unit in the Finnish Winter War. When Finland signed the armistice with the Soviet Union, he fled to Sweden. His mother Aliide and his uncle Artur, the brother of his father and former mayor of Tallinn, left Estonia in the fall of 1944 and later joined Aleksander in Sweden. Only many years after the war the family learned that Karl had been murdered shortly after his disappearance in 1941. Both Aliide and Artur died before Mai was born. Piret's parents Hindrek and Anu got engaged during the war. In order to avoid being forcefully drafted into the German army, Hindrek fled via Finland to Sweden. In the fall of 1944, Piret's mother, along with Hindrek's parents, uncle, and aunt, left Estonia and arrived in Sweden via Germany. Anu was the only one of her family to flee to the West. Her older brothers either stayed behind in Estonia or were deported to Siberia. The family of Mai's mother Maret narrowly escaped the first Soviet mass deportation. When the Red Army advanced again on Estonia in 1944, Mai's grandparents decided to flee across the Baltic Sea to Sweden with their two young daughters. Like many Baltic refugees, Mai's and Piret's parents and grandparents left their homeland in the hope of being able to return soon. Instead they remained separated from their home and close family members for almost fifty years. The Baltic States were the only countries invaded that had their independence not restored directly after the end of the war but only in the early 1990s (Taylor, 2020). During the Cold War, contact between family members in the West and East was limited to the occasional exchange of letters, packages and photos, all of which were subject to Soviet censorship. Their grandparents were already dead when Mai and Piret were able to visit Estonia with their parents for the first time.
Mai and Piret grew up with stories about absent family members, former homes, and times gone by. The memories of their parents and grandparents of their lives in Estonia before and during the war that led to their family's expulsion to Sweden form an important part of their childhood memories. Their escape to Sweden also banished Piret and Mai from a world that had shaped their familys’ past and their parents’ and grandparents’ experience of home. Their idea of home was now gone and unattainable, contributing to Mai's and Piret's ambivalent belonging, where home “is always elsewhere” (Hirsch, 1996: 662). According to Hirsch (1996: 659), postmemory is “a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation”. The stories that Mai and Piret heard as children aroused their curiosity and the desire to get to know their (grand)parents’ world before the past had been destroyed and their continuity with this past had been disrupted by the war. Their family memories produced a notion of absence, loss and separation, evident in the lack of material connections that could have connected Mai and Piret to their family past and home.
The agential power of things and materiality lies in mediating different ways of knowing and being in the world that support processes of belonging and identity-making (see e.g., Povrzanović Frykman, 2016; Holmes, 2019; Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021; Koskinen-Koivisto et al., 2024b). Experiences of materiality, such as a house, a hometown, family graves, landscapes and various other materials and objects influence our ideas of home and belonging. Our relationships to objects and material culture provide us with important (re)memories and tangible points of remembrance. When a person is faced with changes or disruptions in their personal family history, objects can produce a sense of continuity with the past through their ability to store memories of past experiences and relationships (see e.g., Barclay, 2020; Canham et al., 2019; Čeginskas et al., 2024). Thus, materiality and objects leave traces in people's lives and their loss or absence can therefore create a void, which haunts us and makes us feel uneasy, as Holmes and Ehgartner (2021: 263) argue.
The study of Finch and Mason (2000) emphasizes the symbolic value of objects in constructing kinship networks. They distinguish between keepsakes and heirlooms in family relationships, both of which are inherited directly through family relationships. The former refer to objects that are filled with symbolic meaning and affective memories representing family members who previously owned them, while the latter are kept because the heirs feel the obligation to keep these objects without attaching symbolic value to them. According to Finch and Mason (2000: 154), the special emotional status of keepsakes as a means of deepening family relationships is only limited to one generational transmission, after which they become family heirloom. However, Holmes (2019: 182) argues that through their “passed on, layered history within a kinship group and because of their repeated generational use,” objects can help create connectedness and deepen family relationships even with unknown family members from previous generations.
Piret and Mai both own objects that either evoke personal memories of their parents and grandparents or reflect their past experiences and lives. However, they do not have many objects that document their family past in Estonia and at the same time embed them in their parents’ and grandparents’ memories of their former lives. Their fathers arrived empty-handed in Sweden, wearing only their uniforms. Their grandparents left Estonia with items that they considered useful or valuable for their immediate needs. This included clothes and practical things of everyday use, but also silver and gold items and jewellery. Of all these items, the most personal are perhaps those belonging to Piret's mother: a photo album, her favourite collection of poems, a cross pendant and a cake server (which her husband later accidentally threw away).
Mai and Piret appreciate each of these objects as a combination of family heirlooms and keepsakes that date from pre-war Estonia and connect them to the past. At the same time, they also consider them too impersonal or impractical. The inherited objects, while familial and personal in origin, reflect individual tastes and preferences or the fashions of the time. However, these elements seem distant or irrelevant to Mai and Piret. As a result, the objects lack the emotional immediacy and resonance that might make them truly meaningful. The objects therefore offer no emotional connection that would allow Mai and Piret to imagine and reproduce the past world of their parents and grandparents. Even the photos in her mother's album fail to give Piret emotional access to the past. While they document her mother's student life, they have no connection to the stories her mother told about her youth that are meaningful for Piret.
Adopted family objects and their stories
Piret's green glass bowl
The home of Piret is carefully decorated as a cozy, colourful, and welcoming space, which reflects her and her husband's interests and backgrounds. Works by Estonian authors line the shelves alongside English, French, and Swedish books. On the walls are pictures of well-known Estonian painters and various objects of different sizes and materials, such as embroidered tablecloths, tableware, or statues, which Piret inherited from her grandparents and parents. She keeps in her study a glass cabinet that showcases personal items of her grandparents, parents and herself. She has lined her father's and mother's favourite books next to her own favourite children's book. Other shelves show her father's and grandfather's glasses and on the top is an enlarged portrait of a grandmother she never met. This showcase is not primarily about nostalgia or worship; it is neither a sacred shrine nor does it freeze time. Rather, it seems that Piret has created space for an emotional encounter between different generations of her family, connected through memories and objects. However, her most precious object is a decorative bowl made of thick green glass (see Figure 1). When Piret showed me the bowl, I could see that it had been reglued together. Compared to other items in her home, this bowl did not look very spectacular at first glance. The object was made before the war but it was difficult to estimate its age. When asked what it served for, Piret told me that she imagined the bowl being used in a family household to serve sweets, cookies, fruits, or other food to family members and guests. That was also the way she continued to use it at her home.
Piret's adopted family object: The green glass bowl. (Photo by Piret)
Piret introduced the green glass bowl as a family heirloom, even though she did not inherit it from her mother or other relatives. In fact, Piret had bought the bowl in an antique store next to her mother's childhood home in Estonia when she was visiting her parents’ hometown in the 1990s. She recalled how she instantly and intuitively bonded with the green bowl, somehow I got the feeling that this bowl had previously belonged to my grandmother [the mother of her mother]. It was just such a particularly strong feeling that it was hers.
When I asked Piret if she had inquired from the shop owner about the origins of this bowl, she explained that “there were so many things [in the shop] and [the shop owner] was a young man; he had no clue of anything”, neither about the objects nor past events. Hence, she does not know the ‘true origin’ of this green bowl, where it comes from and whether there is any connection to her family. She also does not know exactly what happened to her family's possessions after the war. Although Piret jokingly calls the idea that the bowl once belonged to her family “just a crazy fantasy,” she does not completely rule out the possibility that the new homeowners sold or gave away items found in her family's house to the antique shop next door. Neither her mother nor any other family relatives who lived in the house at the time are alive, so there is no one who can confirm or refute whether her family owned and used this or a similar green glass bowl. The uncertainty and lack of concrete knowledge about the bowl's origin and its relationship to her family does not bother Piret. On the contrary, it opens up new possibilities to imagine and integrate it as part of her family's legacy, thus deepening the felt bonds with her grandmother and mother, I can feel [the connection] because nobody can challenge me and say that it's not the case, that [the bowl] didn’t belong to my grandmother. It is now my grandmother's bowl!
Mai's glass case with a metallic bird
Mai's home contains an eclectic mix of items and textiles from different eras, true to the principle that “old things are always much more beautiful than new ones,” also from the perspective of sustainability. The furniture, pictures and various objects are not arranged to display a specific style but Mai is more concerned about “what they say about me.” Many objects have a direct connection to family members, but there are also objects that simply testify to her passion for collecting things. As Mai points out, things are important for me and I have lots of things, which I like and which I want to see but they don’t need to be my grandmother's things or my mother's things. I like to shop myself as well, but I like old things, that's something I inherited from my father; he was like this, too.
When talking about objects she treasured and connected with her family, Mai showed me a square, shallow glass container with a drawing on the side and a metallic bird attached to it (see Figure 2). The glass container was probably made during the golden years of the Estonian Republic in the 1920s or 1930s. The delicate details suggest that it probably belonged to a woman rather than a man. However, its original purpose is unclear to Mai. Perhaps it was used to store pens or jewellery, or it was simply intended as an empty decorative item. According to Mai, it is an object whose ownership is associated with a certain social status and money in times gone by. Mai finds this object “a bit kitsch” and certainly did not keep it because of its design, appearance, or usefulness. What makes this glass container so special to her is the way it came into her possession and the fact that she believes it belonged to her grandmother Aliide, the mother of her father, whom she never met.
Mai's adopted family object: The glass container with the metallic bird. (Photo by Mai)
When Estonia regained independence in the early 1990s, Mai's father was suddenly contacted by a former neighbour in Estonia, who asked him to come and collect a box with things that had belonged to his family. The elderly lady explained that his mother Aliide, shortly before fleeing the country, had asked her to store the box until it was safe for the family to return home to Estonia; and now it was finally time to take it back. The glass container with the metallic bird was one of the things in the box, which the neighbour had kept for all the years. When Mai's father returned with the box to Sweden, he was able to positively identify some things as having belonged to his parents, but he did not recognize the glass case. He even doubted that the item had ever belonged to his mother and suspected that the neighbour had put it in the box with his parents’ things. At first, he wanted to throw the glass container away, but as Mai insisted on keeping it, he gave it to her.
Mai described her grandmother as a lady who, through education and marriage, belonged to Estonia's pre-war social elite. She finds it plausible that this decorative item was owned by her grandmother, even if she cannot know for sure. There are two contradictory statements from contemporary witnesses of her grandmother regarding the origin of the glass container and its connection to her family. However, the glass container evoked “feelings” and a kind of connection with her grandmother when Mai first saw it. So she decided to believe a stranger, the old lady, rather than her father. She counters my question of why her father has no memory of the object with other questions. Her father was very young when he left home, and how many young people ever pay attention to what their parents have at home? And why would the neighbour put something in the box that did not originally belong to Aliide or her family? Mai has chosen to believe that this glass container with the bird belonged to her grandmother, who must have valued it so much that she wanted to save it.
Mnemonic and imaginative qualities of adopted family objects
Adopted family objects serve to deepen a feeling of continuity in family relationships and help people to position themselves and within their affective kin relationships. The practice of appropriating previously unknown objects as emotionally meaningful family heirlooms intertwines the object's biography (Mímisson, 2012) with that of the owner. The object's biography does not refer to its life course or to a specific past experience or memory of its owner. Rather, it is about the object's meaning to an individual and its ability to strengthen a person's belonging and identity formation processes in accordance with their memories.
Mai's and Piret's relationship to their objects highlight the role of material objects for embedding us in socio-cultural and historical contexts through creating belonging, producing memory and negotiating social relationships and power relations (see e.g., Kuusisto-Arponen and Savolainen, 2016; Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021; Koskinen-Koivisto et al., 2024a). Even though its origin, history, and connection to a person may be unclear, interpreted, or imagined, an adopted family object can nevertheless closely link to that person's biography.
Everything Piret knows today about her mother's early life in Estonia is based on her mother's memories. Her mother was both Piret's only source of knowledge about her family, as well as the only living connection to that side of the family. As a child, she knew that she had relatives in Estonia but they were essentially absent people who lived in another country and whom she could not meet and get to know. At the same time, her relatives were not complete strangers: she knew them from her mother's stories, which helped her build an emotional relationship with them. The same applies to the role of Mai's father and his memories in shaping her relationships with his family.
The stories and memories of her mother helped Piret to imagine her mother's everyday life with her brothers and parents in Estonia, including situations in which the family ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, or celebrated Christmas, Easter, or birthdays. The early death of her grandparents and her mother's flight to Sweden, which led to her forced separation from her brothers, meant that Piret was unable to experience such intimate kinship relationships. In this context, the green bowl takes on important emotional significance as it allows Piret to link her own life with affective family memories in a playful and imaginative way. As Piret explained, I feel [the bowl] is like a link to my grandmother and the foregone times and home. I have nothing else, and I will be never able to see how it was when they lived there. But this is something on which I can build my imagination, on how it looked like in their homes.
Recent studies show how objects, through tangible, sensory, and haptic engagement, help people imagine past times and relive relationships, feelings, and atmospheres that mediate belonging and continuity (e.g., Holmes, 2019; Povrzanović Frykman, 2024). Even mundane objects of domestic use, such as Piret's green bowl, can become tangible stand-ins for family lives disrupted by war, displacement, and death, acquiring affective meaning because they are associated with absent or missing family members who are imagined to have previously touched, held, or used them (Povrzanović Frykman, 2016: 47). In this way, the bowl serves as a material anchor for imagination, bridging the gap between an unattainable past and an emotional connection to it.
At the same time, objects can produce new authenticities of the past, reflecting personal experiences as well as collective memories and imaginations that become meaningful in present-day processes of sense-making and belonging (Walker et al., 2023; Barclay, 2020: 2). In the absence of lived memory, such objects provide a material basis for imagining family, home, and continuity.
Piret recounted how shocked she was when someone accidentally dropped the green bowl a few years ago. In this moment, she realized that the bowl “was all I had from there”: from her mother's past, home and her family in Võru. Despite the visible damage that now makes the bowl less beautiful and presentable, which are important criteria in Piret's relationship with objects, she continues to use it regularly. She felt that the near-loss of the bowl increased its symbolic and emotional value as a precious family object. This was also observed by Holmes and Ehgartner (2021), in their study on the haunting qualities of absent objects. They argue that the loss of an object can make it “more remarkable”, “more special” and “more worthy of being memoralized”, amplifying its emotional significance for its owner (Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021: 262). The materiality of the green bowl is imbued with affective mnemonic imaginaries that allow Piret to express and reproduce her family ties (see Holmes, 2019: 183–184). By imagining that this or a similar bowl might have been used by her mother or grandmother in Estonia, Piret has the opportunity to imagine and physically experience a continuity of family practices. She may imagine absent family members in specific situations or even associate the bowl with certain smells, habits, or preferences in Estonia that are familiar to her through the stories her mother told about her own childhood and adolescence. It endows the adopted green bowl with a meaningful biography in relation to Piret's own biography and important family memories, giving Piret a sense of inclusion in past family relationships from which she was excluded.
The bowl has thus become intertwined with Piret's intimate family memories and stories that are no longer easily separated from the object. This practice allows Piret to forge family relationships with her grandmother and mother; not as part of some abstract and distant memory of her mother, but as part of her own everyday practices with the bowl. Although Piret bought the bowl, it is capable of evoking affective bonds with unknown family members. By producing a “materialized” link to her mother's stories and memories of Estonia, the adopted family object helps strengthen affective and emotional bonds between Piret, her mother and grandmother through its material and mnemonic qualities (see Holmes, 2019: 188). According to Kurpiel and Maniak (2024: 124), adopted heritage becomes linked to memory and social relationships that evoke belonging and harmony with the past, even if it is imagined. Piret's case suggests that adopted family objects can help mediate and bridge family relationships in space and time, drawing on different levels of existing and imagined bonds through their mnemonic and material affinities (see Holmes, 2019: 182; Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021: 262).
Mnemonic properties are typically attributed to objects that people already own, but Kurpiel and Maniak's (2024) study of prewar objects suggests that things that people imagine or desire to own also have such a mnemonic function. My findings reflect the results of their study that objects undergo an affective reassessment of their meaning from generation to generation, based on an active selection practice that bestows new emotional value on the object in relation to contemporary identities and values (see Kurpiel and Maniak, 2024: 122–123). Mai and her father attributed different mnemonic meaning to the glass container, which influenced their relationships to it and its acceptance as a possible family heirloom. Unlike her father, whose deep emotional bond with his mother is based on personal memories of everyday interactions, Mai lacks this kind of mnemonic support. For Mai, the glass container offers a way to establish and materially maintain a tangible bond with her unknown grandmother, whom she only knew through her father's memories. For her father, however, the object had neither emotional nor practical value. Or perhaps Mai's father simply could not connect the glass container to his memory of his mother. Like Piret, Mai relied on family memories and stories to build a strong emotional attachment and belonging, I've never met [my grandmother], but that only makes anything said about her, or how much I and my habits resemble her, all the more valuable. You know, such basic things like my father saying ‘Nobody likes porridge but you like eating porridge, like my mother used to like porridge, and we ate lots of porridge at home.’ Whereas my brother doesn't even take a spoonful of porridge! It's a feeling of belonging, so that I sense some connection with her but it's absolutely only through memories and stories. I don’t know her at all. the war came in between, it prevented us from… – and then people got sick and died and they, you know … – everything was left behind. So, it is a feeling that if [the glass container] could be Aliide's, if there could be the slightest chance that it belonged to her, or if I knew it was hers, then it's even more important.
Personal relationships and family networks are embedded in the material nature of everyday life and are linked to both emotional engagement and the memories and imaginations about the past that they evoke (see Holmes, 2019; Kurpiel and Maniak, 2024; Povrzanović Frykman, 2024). According to Finch and Mason (2000: 162), inheritance practice is a highly personal and emotionally significant experience that helps to produce and sustain personal and family relationships. Inherited objects symbolically embody and represent the memory of their former owners, emphasizing the powerful role of materiality in the context of family relationships (see Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021: 267). To maintain a sense of continuity and belonging within family relationships, objects must reflect either personal or family memories or past experiences. Likewise, adopted family objects allow memory to live on and provide the opportunity to imagine and relive past family experiences and practices that bind together the lives of different generations through the object's imagined biography.
In many ways, the object and Mai's family memories interrelate: On the one hand, the supposed origin of the glass container places it in the golden times of pre-war Estonia, when Mai's family relationships were still intact. The story of the glass container is also intertwined with the war and post-war experiences of Mai's father and grandmother, who were separated from their home and property for as many years as the contents of the box were hidden by their neighbour. The object is at the same time an integral part of Mai's personal memory, who can remember how the decorative object came (back) into her family's possession. Finally, the glass container expresses ideas that Mai associates with her grandmother's previous social status in pre-war Estonian society as the wife of a high official in the Estonian government and sister-in-law of the mayor of Tallinn. By adopting this object, Mai not only preserves her family's history but also reworks it. She selectively highlights aspects that resonate with her interpretation of her family's past and her grandmother, whom she never met in person. In contrast, inherited objects may compel recipients to confront aspects of the past they do not identify with or wish to remember.
Similarly, the materiality of the green bowl offers Piret the possibility to draw on various layers of existing and imagined connections with her relatives, which help her mediate family relationships in space and time (see Holmes, 2019: 182). On the one hand, both the glass bowl and container act as a beholder of affective family memories and bonds (Frykman and Povrzanović Frykman, 2016: 24). On the other hand, the objects are a means by which Piret and Mai's actual experiences and affective family relationships are projected onto past situations (see Holmes, 2019: 182). It shows that even adopted family objects can be meaningful in processes of belonging and identity-making. Adopted objects allow memory to live on and provide the opportunity to imagine and relive past family experiences and practices by actively interlinking memory, emotion, and imagination. They possess mnemonic and imaginative qualities that help mediate and deepen family relationships also in contexts of experiences of discontinuity. While the meaning of an inherited object may be fixed or even alienated from the recipient's lived experience, adopted objects, in contrast, derive their value from the individual's active reinterpretation and integration into their personal and familial narratives. Through the practice of adoption, an initially unfamiliar object can be associated with memories and intimate relationships that evoke belonging and harmony with the past, even if it is only imagined (Kurpiel and Maniak, 2024: 124).
Adopted items can acquire powerful symbolic and emotional significance, as seen with Piret and Mai. Hirsch's concept of postmemory highlights how such significance emerges through imaginative investment rather than direct experience (Hirsch, 1996: 662; 1997: 8–9). Similarly, Holmes (2019: 179) shows that family relationships are ‘done’ through material practices of passing on objects and maintaining kinship ties. In the absence of ‘authentic’ heirlooms, adopted family objects therefore enable individuals to creatively maintain these ties and provide a sense of continuity. The significance of family objects thus lies not only in their origins, but also in their relational value and their ability to convey emotional connection and memory across generations. Holmes and Ehgartner (2021: 256–257) further observe that even the absence of objects carries material and emotional meaning, shaping memory and belonging. In this way, adopted objects do more than fill a void; they enable a creative engagement with family history through emotionally charged material practices.
Whereas inherited objects are often seen as carriers of a ‘real’ family past, adopted objects can create room for imagined continuity, allowing individuals to actively participate in shaping their familial memory. This flexibility is a key feature of adopted objects, as shown in the experiences of Piret and Mai: their emotional and mnemonic value does not depend on factual authenticity or direct lineage, but rather on the meaning projected onto them by their current owners. In this way, adopted objects can be more adaptable to individual needs for continuity and connection than inherited ones, whose significance may be constrained by fixed family narratives or expectations. This opens up new emotional possibilities, particularly in families affected by displacement, silence, or disrupted generational ties.
Concluding discussion: Im-material ways of belonging
In this case study, I explored how objects contribute to processes of belonging and ‘doing family’ (Holmes, 2019) within the context of family postmemory. Focusing on Piret's green bowl and Mai's glass container—objects they consider part of their family heritage—I examined how material things allow individuals to “tap into layers of imagined and creative affinities with kin” (Holmes, 2019: 182). Although neither object is verifiably tied to family history, both serve as “receptacles for memories, reminders of family traditions and imaginaries of family past, present and future” (Holmes, 2019: 175). Through them, Piret and Mai gain access to a lost past that remains formative to their sense of identity and belonging.
Material and intangible links work together to create a sense of continuity across generations. To become meaningful, objects need to relate to memories and ideas of the past, even if these are imagined. When Mai and Piret first encountered their adopted objects, the green bowl and the glass container were abandoned items that they could appropriate. Yet their biographical qualities, such as age, origin, and associations with pre-war Estonian society, resonated with Piret's and Mai's expectations of family heirlooms. These features enabled them to imagine and accept the objects as emotionally valuable family objects and part of their personal and family narratives. This aligns with Kurpiel and Maniak's (2024) argument that adopted heritage objects are actively chosen rather than randomly found.
Piret and Mai will never fully know their parents’ past lives and relationships, although these remain central to their own memories. Neither the green bowl nor the glass container is an ‘authentic’ witness to family history, yet both provide a means of emotionally reconnecting with their parents’ stories and experiences. The lack of knowledge about their family past increases the emotional and mnemonic significance of these adopted objects. By projecting memories and imaginations that are not necessarily nostalgic or sentimental onto them, Piret and Mai transform ordinary items into affective vessels of belonging and continuity. Their cases illustrate how materiality, affect, and imagination interact to “produce a particular kind of family knowledge” (Barclay, 2020: 2) essential to intergenerational continuity that bridges absence and presence, loss and reconstruction.
Even unfamiliar or found objects can become as significant as inherited items in enabling people to navigate experiences of rupture, displacement, and loss and in establishing family identity. Through their material and imaginative properties, adopted objects help subsequent generations re-establish connections between past and present and access “a lost origin, where they can learn about a time and place they will never see” (Hirsch, 1996: 665; see also Kurpiel and Maniak, 2024). Thus, the objects’ significance lies not in what they prove, but in what they evoke.
While this study focuses on family postmemory formed under conditions of dislocation and separation during the Cold War in Europe, the practice of adopting family objects offers broader insights into how material culture shapes memory and belonging. Unlike inherited objects, which often carry fixed associations with specific people, places, or events, I argue that adopted objects gain significance through imaginative engagement, selective memory, and emotional recontextualization. Their interpretive openness and capacity to support individual agency make them powerful tools for creatively engaging with family history and negotiating absence and loss when inherited items or narratives are missing or inaccessible.
My work examines how descendants of WWII refugees form affective attachments to objects, adopting and re-signifying them as tools of belonging that fill gaps in memory and meaning. Material culture does more than preserve inherited memory, particularly in contexts of rupture and displacement: it becomes a medium through which new forms of belonging and continuity are imaginatively constructed. The distinction between inherited and adopted objects provides a valuable analytical lens for exploring how memory, identity, and materiality intersect in a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts where loss and dislocation have unsettled continuity. When inherited heirlooms are lost, left behind, or never received, people turn to new or found objects to reconstruct disrupted family relationships and reclaim a sense of continuity and belonging. Adopted objects emerge as material strategies for reassembling fragmented pasts and affirming identity and belonging through creative and affective engagement. The cases of Piret and Mai challenge the assumption that only inherited ‘authentic’ family objects sustain kinship ties and memory.
Recognizing adopted objects as active agents of memory highlights memory as a contingent and socially negotiated process, deeply embedded in material practice. Objects possess specific mnemonic and imaginative properties and convey affective forms of knowledge that shape how people understand the past and sustain social relationships across generations. By showing how individuals actively reconstruct connections to the past when direct inheritance is disrupted, this study reframes postmemory as a layered, affective, and materially embedded process shaped by absence and creative reattachment. It opens new methodological possibilities for examining how people negotiate belonging, continuity, and loss—not only by preserving what remains, but by creating meaning through what is found, chosen, or claimed.
This perspective underscores the importance of studying not only how memory is preserved but also how it is actively reconstructed through material engagement. Future research could explore how adopted objects function across diverse historical and cultural contexts to shape personal and collective identity, belonging, and continuity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Mai and Piret for sharing their family stories, and the anonymous reviewers for their especially encouraging and constructive comments, which helped refine this article.
This article is part of the output of the four-year research project ‘Material and Sensory Memories: Explorations on Autobiographical Materiality’ (SENSOMEMO, 2020–2024) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, which was funded by the Finnish Research Council under Grant 334247. The research project SENSOMEMO was led by Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto and included researchers Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro, Anna Kajander, and the author.
I would particularly like to thank Mai and Piret, as well as my colleague Eerika, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Interviews
Interviews (in Estonian) with Mai (b. in 1964), February 28, 2022 and April, 1, 2022, Sweden.
Interview (in Estonian) with Piret (b. in 1956), June 2, 2022, Sweden.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Finnish Research Council, (grant number Grant No. 334247 (SENSOMEMO, 2020-2024)).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.