The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Anthropology 304

Family, Kin and Community Handout on Family History Paper

Fall 2009

DUE: Monday, Sept. 21
Write a family history, of your family or someone else's, which ties a family's history to its historical and cultural context for at least three generations. Your goal is NOT to tell the specific history of a specific family. Rather, pick a topic, which you find important and interesting, and study how your family's history relates to that topic. Some good examples of topics are changes in gender roles in families, changes in the roles of fathers or mothers over time, family rituals, changes in the economy as these affected family, the impact of new technologies on family, etc.. We will brainstorm in class about other possible topics. Some subjects which were chosen by previous students in this class include: the history of the Olsen family's relationship to a Norwegian American parish church, how weddings have changed over the generations, how race and religion affected the history of an African American family in the South, how television has changed family practices and values, how and why the family farm house was remodeled over several generations, family reunions as a source of family continuity and memory, and how and why family Christmas rituals have changed over generations.

PRIMARY RESEARCH:
Your paper must include primary research and data. The most obvious kind of primary research will be interviews with family members. Other types of primary data might be family records, family Bibles, diaries, letters, photos, newspaper announcement of births, deaths, etc.. We will discuss possible other types of primary data in class.

SECONDARY SOURCES:
You will also need to find some good secondary sources on your problem focus to provide an historical and cultural framework of data and ideas for your primary data.

Where relevant, cite the class readings, discussions, and lectures. Stone's chapter 7 and Cott should be especially relevant to most of our families. We will start the class by reading Stone in order to get more ideas about how to do family history as social history. The study of history was once the study of kings and presidents, and an occasional inventor. But since the 1960s, history has also been about ordinary people doing the ordinary things of everyday life, about their family life, their work, their beliefs and values, and their trials and tribulations, and their relationship to their kin and communities. This kind of history is called social history, and your paper will be an example of social history.

THESIS:
Your paper should have a thesis. That is, it should make some significant statement about the problem focus which is supported by your primary and secondary research and which organizes your paper.

LENGTH:
Your paper should be 10-12 double-spaced typed pages. Be sure to cite all sources with correct in text and bibliographic citations.

FORM AND STYLE:
You may write your paper either in the first person or the 3rd person. You may write it as a story or as a social science history. If you chose to write your paper as a story, the story should have a significant narrative, relevant and interesting detail, and a good creative style.

FORMAT FOR A SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY PAPER:
A typical format might be:

• Introduction, in which you state your purpose and your thesis.
• A section on methodology.
• The main body of the paper, integrating the primary and secondary research.
• Brief conclusions.
• Questions for more research.

GROUPS:
I will try to group students together who are working on similar topics. In and outside of class, group members should share ideas, data, and sources that they think would be helpful to one another's papers.


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