Protestant Missionary Children’s Lives: retrospective on a Research Project

This paper marks a reflective end point for a project focused on the historical lives of British-world Protestant missionaries’ children, from the 1870s to the 1950s. While large in number, their voices were seldom heard and their lives until recently largely untold. There are now significant localised studies particularly of the nineteenth century. This current study takes a more broadly comparative approach (using Scottish and New Zealand Presbyterianism as examples), focusing particularly on the early twentieth century. As such it utilises a range of published and unpublished sources, including oral history and written memoirs. Hermeneutically it takes a holistic approach (the overlapping narrative lenses of parents, institutions and children), informed further by scholarship in the fields of childhood history and the history of emotions. The paper will outline key study findings. It will then pay attention to issues of sources and the place of children / young people in thinking more broadly about missionary history – utilising age as an important, potentially neglected, category of analysis for this scholarly field.