Paper Short Abstract:

The paper focuses on the tradition of family guestbooks in Estonia. It studies them as a genre of vernacular or everyday literacy and delves into the ways people use pages of these books to emphasise their presence and connection to a particular place.

Paper Abstract:

A guestbook is an institutional way to say: “I was here!” (compared to the scribbles on the wall as a non-institutional one). However, as the guestbooks are used in different settings, this statement can convey different kinds of connection to the place where one happens to be; some settings (for example, art galleries) allow one to stay quite anonymous while others (for example, home of a relative) emphasise specific personal affinities.

The focus of my studies is on the guestbooks used in private homes – books where friends and relatives leave a variety of texts concerning their visit or their connections with the host at that particular moment or in the past. These books are a kind of co-authored ouevre, created by the social circle of one person or household in the course of time. And as this circle is fairly stable, it means the same person may pop up on different pages and stress: “I was here again!”

Often, family guestbooks are used as an auxiliary source to study family or local history. However, they also deserve to be studied in themselves – as a particular genre of vernacular or everyday literacy, as spaces which allow people to be creative, to experiment with a variety of modes and positions from which to write. In my paper I bring some Estonian examples from different eras to show the multitude of ways people use to emphasise their presence and connection to a particular place.