Europeana celebrates European heritage by collecting family migration stories all over Europe

The Netherlands, 13 March 2018

2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage, and the Europe we inhabit today is the result of migration, as generation after generation of people spread across the continent and carried their ideas with them. To celebrate this dedicated year, Europeana, the European digital platform for cultural heritage, invites all Europeans, young and old, to share the objects that help them tell their own stories of migration.

The pan-European campaign will kick off on Thursday 15 March in partnership with the House of European History, in Brussels. ‘Everybody has a story to tell about their origins, and the moments that shaped their lives. We want people to share those stories and the objects that tell them, and to help us bring them together online. In that way we can celebrate the diversity and richness of the cultural heritage that is being passed on generation after generation, all over Europe’ says Harry Verwayen, acting Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation.

Blending family stories all over Europe

Europeana is a partner to the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage. Throughout the year, Europeana will run a series of collection day events in partnership with museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections across Europe to build a new online collection, Europeana Migration, that will showcase how the flow of people and ideas has contributed to the richness of Europe’s culture today.  

The goal is to use people’s meaningful objects, ranging from family photographs to letters and postcards and recipes, to help Europeana to tell the story of Europe and the people who live here. These objects and stories will sit alongside items from museums across Europe, helping to paint a bigger picture of European migration movements over the last few centuries. They will be recorded online for posterity and made available for all to discover and use for education, research, inspiration and pleasure.

Europeana invites all visitors to share their family objects and stories to help build this online collection showcasing Europe’s rich history of migration.  Events will be held across Europe throughout the year, starting with a three-day event at the House of European History on 15-17 March.

‘We are proud to host these Migration Collection Days to celebrate our European cultural heritage and to allow people to share and explore their own personal history, which is at the origin of the Europe we know today,’ says Constanze Itzel, Director of the House of European History.

Future events 

• 10-11 May 2018, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, Hungary (partners: REACH Project partners, National Archives of Hungary)

• 25-26 May 2018, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin, Ireland

• 23 June 2018, Instituto Cervantes Library, Utrecht, The Netherlands

• June* [date TBC] 2018, Cardiff, Wales (partners: National Library of Wales, Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Wikimedia UK)

• 18-19 August 2018, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin, Ireland

• 12 September 2018, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies in cooperation with Croatian Heritage Foundation, Zagreb Croatia (partners: Croatian Ministry of Culture, National and University Library in Zagreb, Croatian Radio Television)

• 23 September 2018, Centre de documentation sur les migrations humaines, Luxembourg

• 24-25 November 2018, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin, Ireland

• Autumn 2018*, National Library of Latvia and Latvian Museum of Emigration, Riga, Latvia

• Autumn 2018*, National Library of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia

*Dates subject to final confirmation.

If people cannot attend the events they can also contribute online. 

ENDS

Media contact

Eleanor Kenny - Europeana Foundation

E: Eleanor.Kenny@europeana.eu

Notes for Editors

About Europeana

Europeana is Europe’s platform for digital cultural heritage with a mission to ‘transform the world with culture’. Europeana Collections is Europe’s digital library, museum, gallery and archive. From books, photos and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects, Europeana Collections provides online access to a vast store of cultural heritage material from across Europe for everyone to find, use and share: for research, for learning, for creating new things. (@EuropeanaEU)

About the House of European History

The House of European History opened in May 2017 in the European quarter of Brussels. The permanent exhibition galleries offer a unique experience, immersing visitors in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an exploration of the development of European integration. Visitors can discover the origins and evolution of Europe, learning about both the continent’s diversity and history’s many interpretations of its story. The learning offer of the museum takes a trans-European viewpoint that explores the historical memories, diverse experiences and common ground of the peoples of Europe and how these relate to the present day. Available in 24 languages, entrance to the museum is free.

Europeana DSI is co-financed by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility.