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This paper examines the composition of families in the parish of São José de Encoge, northern Angola, in the early colonial era, using a series of 'family bulletins' collected by the Portuguese colonial government in 1910. Encoge was one of the earliest centres of coffee cultivation in west-central Africa. While not all local families participated in this economy, the census sheds light on family-based cash-crop production after the abolition of slavery in Angola. The literature on post-slavery labour arrangements in Africa almost unanimously suggests that family-extension strategies predominantly aimed to integrate young women and girls into households, using pawnship and guardianship as important methods. The family bulletins from Encoge provide a means to evaluate this assumption on a quantitative basis in an Angolan context. They indicate that, besides natural reproduction and the adoption of second wives, the incorporation of wards, nephews, and nieces was the most common form of household extension, in which elders showed a remarkable preference for male dependants. The bulletins do not provide clear evidence of the presence of enslaved dependants, although some individuals listed as servants were possibly enslaved. Overall, the data suggest that, contrary to common assumptions about agricultural labour in Africa, family-based cultivation and trade of coffee did not discriminate against men or boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia in 1946, the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was passed. This Act was intended to support the postwar migration to Australia of British children, unaccompanied by their parents, and provided them a guardian in Australia: the Immigration Minister. This key provision of the Act continues into the present, covering all unaccompanied child migrants, including refugees. Starting with the parliamentary debates which occurred at the formation of the Act in 1946, this article traces a history of the Act until its first High Court challenge in 1975. In doing so, a focus is placed on a series of key questions raised by its production of categories: How does the Act construct ideas of migranthood? What do the discussions it has provoked have to say about notions of parenthood and the ideal family? And, finally, what concepts of the child have been produced through this legislative and legal history? Through an examination of archival materials, parliamentary debates, court records, and newspaper coverage, this article explores the discursive productions of the Act, following the understanding that ideas of the family, of parenthood, of guardianship, of migrant status, and of the child are not natural, but instead are historically created and produced, here through racialized techniques of governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The existence of minors in a family or among other relatives induces the person drawing up a will to stiffen the roles, to specify the different futures of men and women more clearly and to single out the conditions which may guarantee the duties assigned. These principles are included not only in the wills of the fathers of families but often also characterize the wills of mothers or other relatives, both men and women. And maybe they also explain, as we shall see, the reasons for which it becomes difficult to decide to totally entrust the management, care and guardianship of a patrimony or one’s own minor offspring to a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the Dombes province, in the course of the first decades of the 19th century, with a high mortality among adults, many unions had a premature ending and only a minority of children grew up with both of their biological parents. The Civil Code, established in 1804, tried to organize family solidarity towards orphans. To that end, each time an adult died, leaving one under age child or more, six close relatives had to be gathered, forming a family council, which appointed a guardian and a surrogate-guardian, in charge of the orphan''s material and moral interests. An analysis of the proceedings of such boards of guardians between 1810 and 1824 points to the essential part played by uncles and the near absence of grandparents. In spite of a few conflicts which can be noticed in these administrative documents, the families – there being orphans in practically each one of them – managed to take charge of under age children, none of whom was left to fend for himself or placed in an orphanage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]