Genealogy Interview Assignment

For my Genealogy Interview Assignment, I decided to interview my friend's father, James Smith. For this essay, I have decided to break down the topics I will discussing into 4 parts. The first topic will discuss James immediate family.

The second topic will cover James extended family. The third topic will cover familiar relationships and the final topic will go over James family's culture and values. I will conclude my report with an analysis of trends that I see throughout his genealogy.

The first topic that James and I discussed was his immediate family. While the members of his immediate family are his wife Mary, his daughter Sophia (19 years old), and his other daughter May (17 years old), he only lives with Mary and May as Sophia is currently attending college at the University of Pennsylvania.

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James only marriage is to Mary and they have been married for 20 years. James is currently living in Wilmington, Delaware with his wife and youngest daughter while his eldest daughter is living here at the University of Pennsylvania.

The second topic that James and I discussed was about his extended family. His only sibling is his brother Jacob who is 43 years old. Jacob is single with no children and is also living in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents on the other hand are a little bit more spread out. His father, Herb (68 years old), lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and his mother, Barb (67 years old), lives in Wilmington, Delaware but not in the same house at James immediate family. His father and mother are divorced but his father is married to Janice (65 years old) and they have 2 daughters, Sarah (30 years old) and Grace (27 years old). His father has one sister and one brother, Hannah and Steve.

His mother has 2 brothers, Derek and Tom. All of James's uncles and aunts live in Wilmington, Delaware. His aunt Hannah is married and has 4 boys, Joe, Randy, Julian, and Drew. His uncle Steve is also married and has a boy and a girl, Bill and Mary. On his mother's side, his uncle Derek is married and has 2 girls and 1 boy, Taylor, Beth, and Rob. His uncle Tom is married as well and has 2 boys, Kirk and Sam. In regard to his grandparents, they have all since passed but James remembers visiting his grandmother's sister, great-aunt Libby, as they used to call her. He was unable to remember how many siblings they had, but he did know that his grandmother on his mom's side had 4 sisters and 1 brother. The other 3 grandparents definitely came from fairly large families, the smallest being 1 of 4 other siblings. When they were alive they all lived in Wilmington, Delaware. His grandparent's generation was a far as he could remember.

The third topic we discussed was James family relationships. James said that in a typical year, the list of people he would see the most often is his daughter Sophia, his brother Jacob, his mother Barb, and finally his father Herb. He sees Sophia the most often mainly because she goes to college fairly close to where they live and James brother, Jacob, works for him. After that, he often sees his parents since they visit him quite frequently. There is no specific time of the year where he sees them. Since they live in such close proximity, James sees these family members very often. When I asked if his family did tend to gather for any special celebrations, James chuckled saying that his family's special celebrations were just trying to avoid everyone else's big celebrations. I decided to shift the conversation to more about James childhood by asking him what side of the family he felt closer to growing up. He explained that while growing up there was not one side of the family he saw more than the other. Since the family generally only gathered during holidays, he would see both sides of the family for the same amount of time, and therefore he didn't feel closer to one side than the other.

The final topic we touched on was James family culture and values. In terms of cultural and religious identity, his family is predominantly catholic, but they differ culturally. James father's side of the family is Puerto Rican, while his mother's side of the family is American. While he believes that that Hispanic identity once was something really important to his family, now that the family is a bit more culturally mixed, its significance is no longer what it was before. Not only that but he believes that the elder matriarchs of the family were the ones that pushed the importance of that culture, but since their passing, no one has stepped into that role. I thought that now would be good to look at James family from a more holistic approach, so I asked James about any common careers in his family.

He said that while there was no common career, the aptitude for artwork was strong throughout his family. This creative side was shown more throughout their careers as opposed to family history as James explained that the only family story they liked to share was that his family was the first Puerto Rican family to settle in Wilmington, Delaware in the 40's. As a closing I asked James to describe his family using only 2 words. The first one, which I expected, was creative which can be seen through his family's emphasis and knack for all things art. The second word he chose was diligent. The reasoning for this was because neither side came from a position of "convenience" as he put it. For his family, everything they did was very "D.I.Y" (Do it yourself) in that they had to work very hard to carve out careers. Interestingly enough, Sophia was the first person in her family to attend college. When I asked about the important values in his family, James when straight back to that idea of "D.I.Y" as it was his family's work ethic and perseverance that got them in the comfortable position that they are in today.

As a closing to my genealogy essay, I wanted to analyze some of the points that James and I talked about. One thing that I thought was very interesting was how the space that they were in kept the family close. Since a majority of the family lived in the same town, I gathered that having big families and having family members nearby had become a hegemonic ideology in James family. Continuing on that point, the couple that had the least number of children, excluding those that didn't have children, was 2 with the average being 3.7 per couple. This only further demonstrated that the hegemonic ideology in James family was to have a large number of children. While the family is fairly close to other another both in relationships and physical location, they are very nonchalant about seeing each other. I believe this to be the reason why James family doesn't have any explicit family traditions and activities and general negative views towards the big holidays. My overall impression of James family was that while they are a close family, they tend to co-exist rather than spend quality time as one big family. This is probably due to the fact that they live in such close proximity to each other, having one time a year to all get together seems unnecessary as they are essentially gathered together year-round.