Beige linen-covered boards 232 x 184 mm inscribed on the front cover upper right in pencil Family Group/1944-5.; upper centre felt-tipped pen (added later) Sheep. Inside the front cover is a list of numbers in pencil under the heading For drawings/Do backgrounds/like 32 & 34 bottom which may relate to the page numbers; next to this is inscribed Family Group/for Impington/March/1944. Inside the back cover (see HMF 2220a) is a printed label. The notebook originally contained 48 pages of off-white lightweight wove paper 228 x 180 mm perforated 12 mm from the spine. Thirty-nine drawings have been ascribed to the notebook. All the pages have been detached and many have been cut down. They are numbered in pencil upper left on the verso but since many of the numbers are unrecorded or obscured no attempt has been made to put them in order. Dating remains a problem: although this notebook is inscribed March 1944 and 1944-5, none of the pages are dated 1945, a few are dated 1943, others 1944 and some have been misdated or dated subsequently. To add to the confusion, on the verso of HMF 2250 is an undated inscription recording subjects considered for enlarging from Upright Sketchbook 1942 and this notebook, referred to as 'Impington notebook', making it highly probable that the family groups were begun in 1943.

The educationalist Henry Morris asked Moore for a sculpture to be placed in the grounds of a proposed village college in Impington, Cambridgeshire. Moore later wrote: 'The Family Group in all its differing forms sprang from my absorbing [Morris's] idea of the village college – that it should be an institution which could provide for the family unit at all its stages.' The commission was delayed and finally refused due to lack of funds, but a cast of the resulting Family Group 1948-49 LH 269 was installed at Barclay School, Stevenage, in 1950.