Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington were absolutely right when they called family strategies “the intuitively appealing metaphor for family response to structural barriers”. This appeal probably explains the avalanche of studies on the subject since the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. The last contribution, to my knowledge, is a collection of articles edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jurgen Schlumbohm in 2000. I will not even try to outline the vast historiography. This paper focuses on another problem. It is an attempt to show that concepts built on appealing metaphors lose much of their appeal in empirical research for the simple reason that their application tends to be more complicated than expected. In the following pages an example of such an experience is presented. Within the virtual walls of the Dutch National Research Institute for Economic and Social History, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, we have been struggling with family strategies since 1994. Now that we are about to publish the third volume on the subject, it is time to evaluate what we have accomplished.