The recent changes in the agricultural world tend to blur the family farm’s boundaries, which invites us to analyse those two institutions as articulated. On the basis of a case study conducted on dairy cattle farms in Vercors, we set a framework which links family configurations and farm paths. In order to do that, we use the two concepts of descent group and domestic group. Thus, we reveal the diversity of ways of being a farming family, ways of being which don’t have the same consequences on the management of the farm. We show inversely how the farm’ family and technical history can have a greater or lesser strong influence on people. The study reveals that even in farms which are designed from a legal point of view to enable to keep the family at a distance, the family dimension is never absent.