Writing Family History & Culture with Students

The early stages of any digital storytelling project is writing. Lots of it. Before students decide what story they would like to tell digitally, they need to do a lot of writing first. My class has just begun their journey.

Yesterday, my eighth-grade students started sketching family trees. On the white board, I demonstrated one and I repeated over and over again that not knowing something is o.k. 

Not knowing something about our family tree is just as valuable as what we do know. These gaps can provide starting points for questions with our families.

As I sketched a basic family tree, I encouraged the students to try one as well. Some of the questions they asked along the way:

• how do I handle someone who was divorced?
• what happens if someone was adopted?
• what if I don't know a relative's name?

It is important to anticipate these types of questions which may be emotionally challenging to some students. What will you say to the student who tells you they are adopted? How will you guide the student who has step-parents and multiple sets of grandparents? I don't think there is any one right answer because all of our kids are unique; however, being mentally prepared to be encouraging, empathetic, and supportive comes with the territory of this type of writing.

an early example of a student tree

So much of this project is about talking as it is about writing. My class was noisy with students talking to each other about what they know, don't know, remember, don't remember--talk is good! Some students need to talk as a part of their pre-writing. Use it to encourage your students to talk at home--to continue the conversations with mom and day--to reach out to grandparents or any family who might help them.

After sketching a basic tree, I asked the students to write down the following questions which I adapted from NPR's StoryCorp Great Questions list:

1. What is your ethnic background?
2. Where are your various family members from? Has anyone ever visited there?
3. What traditions have been passed down and still exist? What traditions have been lost through the years?
4. Who are/were your favorite relatives when you were a child or adolescent?
5. Do you remember any favorite family stories that a specific family member loved telling?

These are questions I want the students to start asking at home. Gather information and gather photographs! Ask at dinner. Email aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins for photographs and keep them in a digital folder online.

We will need these digital photographs for the blogs, podcasts, and videos we compose later.

After this, I turned their attention to a poem, Eating Together, in our textbook by Chinese poet Li-Young Lee. We discussed what information struck us as cultural clues and what information struck as pieces of his family history. In the end, what came out of this was food.

Food is a beautiful conduit for writing about our families and cultures and will be the focus of our brainstorming tomorrow.

Last night, I received this email from a student:

Mr Kelley,

Over dinner with my mother and I told her that we had been discussing the family tree in writing and she told me that her father went crazy years ago and researched his whole Taylor family tree. She got it out and showed it to me where as it dates as far back as to the late 1700's. All the information is extremely precise, with it there is birth, death, cause of death, and burial place for each person. Some people even more background added to that. Of course this is amazing and I've been sitting in my room with the documents reading through and looking up some of the background from it, but there was so much to see as unfortunate for some of these family members. As I read through the generations it showed that in one family a child only lived for two hours. Years later his brother was born and he only lived for one. I don't know how my grandfather did this and managed to find everything spot on, but I think it'd be a great thing to bring in and show you for the family tree unit so that is what I intend to do for tomorrow. I look forward to showing you this for it is pretty amazing.

Young people love writing about themselves and discovering their place in the world. This project funnels the larger world into the manageable and meaningful world of family. With your guidance and modeling, you will find your students compiling many topics to explore. 

Writing about family history and culture provides an opportunity for me to model the importance of primary sources, primary documents, and talking and staying connected with family.

Family History and the Importance of Talking

Ezra Wylie's invention buckled cotton more tightly together.

Today I spoke with Heather Wylie on my I Remember podcast. Heather is an amateur genealogist who is tracing the family history of Wylies and Whites. She keeps a rather detailed and inspiring website An Unexpected Discovery as well as a terrific blog that would serve as a great model or mentor text for anyone thinking about writing and sharing their own family history.

During the interview, Heather detailed the life of her paternal great grandfather, Ezra Frantz, who was born and raised on a family farm in Illinois and who travelled the country as life-long inventor.

Browsing Heather's website and blog, and listening to her on this interview, one can't help but feel armed with the best advice of all when it comes to discovering your family's past: start with yourself.

One of the things that sticks most with me from my conversation with Heather is her stressing the importance of talking. It seems silly to have to remind ourselves to talk to one another, but Heather makes a strong point. So often, we have to get over ourselves and pick up the phone or go for a visit, and make the effort to talk to our older relatives. They are a wealth of knowledge, experience, and stories that will never be tapped unless we ask them to share. And so many of our older relatives are not on social media and need the benefit of our speaking with them face to face.

People are also shy--especially people in our own families. But if take Heather's advice, and start with ourselves, then we can be the ones who get up, leave the house, and keep our family narratives alive.

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The "I Remember" podcast featuring Heather's interview can be played directly below or downloaded for free from iTunes.

Finding Narrative in Numbers

Nosing around online for information about my maternal grandfather's family--a part of our family that neither I, nor my mother, have known--led me to the family 1940 census record. 

This is a great lesson is trying to find a story in the numbers. I'd never tried to find a story in math before today, but I imagine many amateur genealogists find themselves faced with this challenge as well. It is part of the fun of the puzzle.

My brain took me immediately to the fact that seven adults and one child shared a three bedroom row home on Wharton Street in Philadelphia. Shuffling the possibilities in my head, I can put my grandparents in one room, possibly three or four siblings in another (Thomas, John, Francis, and Sam), and a step-sister (Sanina) and her 4 year old son in another room. Knowing the small dimensions of those bedrooms, I can't imagine four young men sharing one room. Some must have slept in what would otherwise be the dining room or living room--perhaps the young boy--putting three in one bedroom and two in another. Still, everyone must have been climbing over one another in the one bathroom home.

Another number leapt off the page: 0. My grandparents, Joseph and Lillian, reported making $0 in 1939. Born in Italy, they were 65 and 58 respectively. Reporting as laborer and housewife, and having just come through the Great Depression, I can't imagine much savings.

While census records, on the surface, may not be able to confirm the details my mind immediately gravitated to--where did everyone sleep--the records do tell me another angle of the story. The records remind me about the culture of sharing these generations fostered. 

My grandfather, John

I forget that...and I forget how drastically we've changed. For better or for worse depends on your perspective.

From what I can gather, the average American income in 1939 was $1,368. Among the three reporting income and working, John, Thomas, and Sanina, my grandparents' household made $1,960 in 1939. That comes to just under $38 dollars a week when everyone is working and income is consistent. However, only one of the three wage earners, Thomas, a shipping clerk, reported working a 40 hour week consistently...and my grandfather, John, worked a range of hours week to week driving a truck, while Sanina reported working only five hours a week as a tailor.

In 1939, a gallon of gas was estimated at 10 cents a gallon, a loaf of bread was 8 cents, and a pound of hamburger meat was 14 cents.

This was the first census that attempted to measure the social and economic situation of the country. Never before had someone been asked to declare how much money they earned--the previous models of the census were built mostly around population shifts and growth. By the end mid 1940s, it was common to find editorials bemoaning the census changes as an invasion of privacy. 

Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, April 24, 1944

The numbers leave me with questions that I know I will never answer. For instance, I am left wondering how my grandparents' household managed when my grandfather enlisted on August 7, 1942 and shipped off to the Pacific theater in WWII. While my grandparents household depended on the $780 my grandfather made in 1939, I wonder how much of the estimated $468 he made as a private was sent back home.

In the end, the numbers leave me thinking about the moral of an often rewritten story--rewritten and retold for good reason: the families of the greatest generation took great care of one another. And I wonder in what ways we search for ourselves in their example.