"Materialistic historiography... is based on a constructive (as opposed to an additive) principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes.... a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast era out of the homogeneous course of history - blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in the work and at the same time cancelled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history." (Benjamin, 1969, pp.262-263)

The construction of a family history as a form of meaning production is an active social process that focusses on particular forms of life in definate historical contexts. Its value lies in the specificity of its materials and the power of those materials to participate in multiple discourses simultaneously - historical, personal, political, popular. The connection of those materials and discourses is often serendipitous, dependent more on a tradition of patterning than the 'exclusionary ideology of referential cognition in the discipline of historiography.' (Ulmer, 1989, p.83)

In this sense, family history can be mystoriographical. It lays emphasis on the materials the family historian happens to unearth.