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In this article, I have addressed primarily the production processes underlying family history, its relationship to time and the ways in which finnish people has categorized the past and everyday life. My corpus of source materials, which is in written form, was collected 1997 through a collection competition called «the Great Family History», organized by the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archives in Helsinki. The purpose of the collection contest was to gather information concerning social processes of change as seen through the experiences of family and kin group as well as to identify what it means to be aware of one's own family history.Family histories play an important role in creating a picture of recent history. With the year 2000 nearly upon us, the 20th century naturally becomes part of our recent history: narratives are told concerning this century, its events are well-known. Research material contains information received from parents and grandparents which often goes back as far as the 19th century, even though the narration focuses on the nineteen hundreds. The main themes in family history concerning this century in Finland are: mass emigration to America that took place at the beginning of this century, the wars (1918, 1939-1945) and the post-war construction of welfare-state. There is also a great deal of interest in the 19th, 18th and even earlier centuries. A partly fictional reconstruction of everyday life is made with the aid of family history research and can reach back as far as the 16th century.Persons who produce family histories are most likely aware of the categories of official and unofficial history, each of which contains certain models and rules for narration. Unofficial history is considered to be oral history, and the transfer of oral memoirs to paper in writing is seen to be an interpretation which complements official history. For example emotions and personal experiences belong to the unofficial history. The significance of family history is thus that it ensures that the past is transmitted to future generations from a perspective important to the self. Each historical period produces and brings forth styles of speech and cultural models through which historical narrative is processed. When Finns write about their pasts or their own lives, the model used is often one of a survival tale, which begins with what could be interpreted as complaints of poverty and toiling from dawn to dusk. One noteworthy features is however, the fact that the narrative does not end here: Finns tell of wretchedness and want and transform it into a source of pride by explaining how their families survived harsh conditions through their rugged resilience and refusal to give up.Memoirs and oral history are used to produce personal histories of family and kin, to write down one's roots or origins. It can be observed that oral history brings together the actual and recollected past and often presents them as nostalgia and myth. Family histories are told from the perspectives which are seen to best define one's own background and reinforce one's own identity: therefore the protagonist may be the narrator's grandmother of whom she or he has a personal recollection, or a man who lived in the 17th century, who is considered to be the founder of the family line. At issue in the transmission of oral history is not only unconscious forgetting but also power and influence. Narratives are always the results of selection processes and contain the values, attitudes and conceptions of historical events held by their narrators. These examples suffice to illuminate important areas of this research topic - particularly the significance of narration to persons and the relationship between narrated history and official history.

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Our aim is to introduce the oral history project of veteran MPs in Finland and to depict some aspects of our ongoing research. The Library of the Finnish Parliament has, since 1988, produced over 340 oral history interviews with veteran parliamentarians, politically active in the post-war era. The recently digitalised collection – approximately 2,000 hours of recorded theme interviews and 50,000 pages of transcriptions – sheds light on the changes and continuities in parliamentarians’ work and their views on society and political life since the 1940s. Parliamentarians, mandated by the people through elections, operate in the conjunction of democracy, where the will of the people is supposed to be refined into political decision-making. Parliamentarians’ thinking on politics and political life is also intriguing on the grounds that while the Members of Parliament work in the prime forum of national politics, a major share of the actual power may still lie somewhere else in society. Moreover, MPs’ views on their own work have rarely been explored, even though they are at the heart of politics. In this article, we ask what kind of benefit or disadvantage results from the fact that interviews are conducted, transcribed and archived by the same institution that ex-MPs have served during their political career. We also argue that oral history of the MPs should be approached not only in terms of elite oral history as a given category, but also by paying attention to the variation of MPs’ experiences as political representation. The concept of institutional remembering provides frames for understanding interviews as communicative events, where both parties are active agents in positioning themselves and the other. In this article, we show how the questions posed by the interviewers are also a substantial part of the data as they frame the concept of power in a negative or positive manner.