Like a ghost assigned to purgatory, family history is never settled. Despite attempts by genealogists to elicit a lineage from their materials, they can never control, except by exclusion, the material's capacity to engender rhizomatic offshoots that disrupt and disturb any attempt at a singular narrative.

In its inability to provide a 'final solution' to a familial problem, family history corresponds to the activities of 19th century spiritualists who built their beliefs around possibilities rather than grounding them in 'fact'. The spiritualists were engaged in a kind of negative dialectic that argued that while there was no evidence to show that spirits did exist, there was no evidence to show that they did not.

But the link between spiritualism and family history is to be found more obviously in the kinds of people who engaged or continue to engage in these practices. Spiritualism, like genealogy, attempted to make the past speak into the present. Many spiritualist practices were aimed to getting in touch with dead relatives. The medium served as a conduit between, very often, lost loved ones and their heirs, sending messages of reassurance about the possibility of reunion beyond the grave.

The mediums were very often women - beginning with the two girls often credited with drawing attention to the somewhat scurrilous behavior of ordinary kitchen tables, Kate and Maggie Fox. As Cottom notes, not only were mediums very often women, "many women were among its believers, and women's rights were often among its goals, as when Victoria Woodhull ran for president of the United States on the Cosmo-Political ticket." (Cottom, 1991, p.5) Family genealogy is also very often a female activity. This is somewhat ironic given that tracing matrilineal lines is far more difficult than tracing patrilineal lines. Family history is often an attempt at a kind of herstory.

And the domestic is crucial in both spiritualism and genealogy, with each challenging in their own way the professionalisation of knowledge.