Despite an increased interest in how societies produce, present and interpret the past, empirical studies of how people make sense of and use the past in their everyday life are less common in public history. This paper explores how people use material culture to make sense of their recent past by (re)constructing personal, family and community histories both in museum exhibitions and through everyday engagements at home. We use two case studies: The West Indian Front Room -Memories and Impressions of Black British Homes exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, London, and the homes of six families of Albanian heritage in Athens, Greece. In both cases, objects play a key role in mediating and reflecting identity and meaning-making.

Drawing from the author’s ethnographic/participatory work with Albanian families in Athens, this paper tells the story of two families constructing identity and heritage in Greece and Albania. The processes involved in the families’ literal and metaphorical connections with the ‘old country’, manifested in cross-border links, everyday routines and material cultures, are integral to their homebuilding projects in their new locale. Given families’ multiple-place-allegiance and disenfranchised status in a Greek context, theories on transnationalism and history and heritage from below are utilised in order to consider identity and heritage formation in the course of everyday routines. It is argued that the experience of building lives in more than two worlds results in the emergence of plurilocal identities, challenging spatially bounded notions of heritage.