Family History Work

This is something you can work on bit by bit during the next few weeks:

I want all of you to start investigating how the themes and questions we are dealing with in our class are present in your own family history.  Start asking your relatives about the family's experience with migration, emigration, ethnicity, bilingualism, cultural roots, identity, discrimination, etc. When did your ancestors come to the US? How many generations ago? What did they do? What kind of 'hood did they live in? Connect with their spouses?  How did they see this experience?...How did they earn a living? Where they part of an ethnic enclave of some sort?  Did they belong to a union? Start gathering family stories about this and writing some notes for a short report later.  But make sure that you think through the kinds of questions you want to ask based on what we are learning in class and through our readings. 

You might find yourself interviewing your parents and grandparents...that should be very interesting...even if it was their grandpartents who migrated they might have a lot to say about it...if you are native american in some part talk about that as well...if you are of old yankee stock...well, see what you can find out about Yankee identity.