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Genealogy | Uncovering Your Family History

Learn ways to uncover the unique memories of your family and create lasting connections.

Just as the oral histories of people around the world are disappearing amid rapid change, there is a risk that your family’s personal stories, too, will be lost forever. In The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, anthropologist Elizabeth Keating helps you to uncover the unique memories of your parents and grandparents and to create lasting connection with them in the process.

As you seek to learn more about your family history, how do you get beyond familiar anecdotes and avoid the frustration of oppositional generational attitudes? By asking questions that make the familiar strange, anthropologists are able to see entirely different perspectives and understand new cultures. Drawing on her lifelong work in this field, Keating has developed a set of questions that treat your parents and grandparents not just as the people who raised you, but as individuals of a certain society and time, and as the children, teenagers, and young adults they once were. The Essential Questions help you to learn about the history of your elders, to see the world through their eyes, and to honor the language they choose to describe their experiences.

Elizabeth Keating is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies culture and communication, and her research projects include investigations into power sharing, hierarchy, visual language, inter-generational narrative, and the role of technology in influencing language practices. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland. She is also the author of Words Matter: Communicating Effectively in the New Global Office.

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