The participant sample was recruited by means of psychology department subject pools and included 429 adults, 229 of whom attended a large research university in the southwestern United States; the remainder attended a vocational college in the same area. The participants were administered the Family Background Questionnaire, an instrument designed to collect information on several areas of family history before the age of 18. Seven of the items from this instrument inquire about sexual abuse and were used in this study. An additional 14 items appended to the end of the instrument inquired about various aspects of childhood memory, including memory of abuse. More than one-third (n=166) of the study sample indicated they had experienced one or more forms of child abuse. The study found that similar proportions of those reporting histories of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse reported that they had periods without memory of their abuse (19.8 percent, 11.5 percent, and 14.9 percent, respectively). These participants, however, apparently referred to both a lack of conscious access to their abuse memories as well as the intentional avoidance of the memories for some period. A great deal of variance was found in the reported quality of general childhood memory, but this was unrelated to reporting a history of child abuse. In addition, it was apparently normative to recover previously forgotten childhood events, and this also was found to be unrelated to a history of child abuse. 4 tables and 34 references