'Verlichte vergezichten. Sterrenkundige conversaties en huiselijke demonstraties rond de salontafels van de achttiende eeuw', in: Jaarboek voor Genealogie 62 (2008). The established historical canon does not have a good memory for the lives of women, nor is it common for genealogists to chart family histories along female lines. As a result all too often one forms a rather limited picture of the past. While this special issue of the Dutch Yearbook of Genealogy was brought out to link the Dutch historical canon and the history of Dutch families, this specific article aims to investigate this thematic link along the line of women – without forgetting the contributions made by men. The eighteenth-century planetarium of the Frisian wool carder Eise Eisinga serves as point of departure for a narrative about the involvement of women in the distribution of scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century. Using the history of the Ladies’ Society of Natural Sciences in the Zeeland town of Middelburg (1785-1887), it is argued that one needs an eye for the interplay between the private and the public sphere to recognize how Enlightenment practices offered new scientific, scholarly, and social views to both men and women. Conversations, lessons, readings, and experiments at home as well in other intimate social settings such as the exchanges taking place in the small cultural societies where friends and acquaintances met, contributed significantly to the transfer of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Thanks to the participation of women both as recipients and as mediators in these exchanges, entire families became familiar with the panoramic and astronomical views that were so characteristic of the Enlightenment. The Schorer family in Middelburg serves amongst others to illustrate how it is possible to trace the collective scientific and scholarly interests of a family along the line of women over several generations.