The purpose of this paper is to study families of Artinian or one-dimensional quotients of a polynomial ring R with a special look to level algebras. Let GradAlg H (R) be the scheme parametrizing graded quotients of R with Hilbert function H . Let B → A be any graded surjection of quotients of R with Hilbert function H B = (1, h 1 , . . . , h j , . . .) and H A , respectively. If dim A = 0 (respectively dim A = depth A = 1) and A is a "truncation" of B in the sense that H A = (1, h 1 , . . . , h j −1 , α, 0, 0, . . .) (respectively H A = (1, h 1 , . . . , h j −1 , α, α, α, . . .)) for some α h j , then we show there is a close relationship between GradAlg H A (R) and GradAlg H B (R) concerning e.g. smoothness and dimension at the points (A) and (B), respectively, provided B is a complete intersection or provided the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of A is at least 3 (sometimes 2) larger than the regularity of B. In the complete intersection case we generalize this relationship to "non-truncated" Artinian algebras A which are compressed or close to being compressed. For more general Artinian algebras we describe the dual of the tangent and obstruction space of graded deformations in a manageable form which we make rather explicit for level algebras of Cohen-Macaulay type 2. This description and a linkage theorem for families allow us to prove a conjecture of Iarrobino on the existence of at least two irreducible components of GradAlg H (R), H = (1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 10, 6, 2), whose general elements are Artinian level algebras of type 2.