Building a Family Tree & Archive
Thu, 14 Mar
I have been thinking about creating a family archive of my paternal family since September of last year. During the first week of that month, I met my one of my Dad's cousins for the first time in Germany. This may seem insignificant but to me it was a really special and telling encounter because although I had spent a good amount of time with Dad's cousin's father in Ghana before his death early last year, I had not spent much time (or, in most cases, even met) much of this side of the family because we have been dispersed transnationally.
So in taking this class, it turned out that now would be a good time to start building the archive and family tree. I was given further encouraged by this message on the SFPC introductions channel by Randa Hadi (taking Relational Reconstructions class this spring) in which she shared her recent interest in her own family archive and project, How to Build an Archive.
I want the archive to be living and breathing. I want to achieve this by not only documenting the past but also documenting the presence of my paternal family members today: to enable them to build on, edit, refute any information I collect about our past and also use the archive to house information about where/how our family is today. This is particularly important to me because when I met my uncle for the first time in September our conversation revealed that he didn't know about his other cousins in Germany (my Aunt--and her kids--and Uncle) even though he had adopted Germany as a second home a few years back.
One concern I have is the aspect of using a tree to document the family lineage. I know that I will inevitably leave people out (those forgotten or unclaimed) and that some people may not want to be included. For now, I my thinking is that allowing this project to be genuinely accessible and iterative could help mitigate these harms.
My next steps are to start compling the information I have and to set up my server using digital ocean.
Sun, Apr 07
I am been feeling unmotivated to work on this project for reasons I am still parsing through. The first reason that has become clear to me, as I shared at our final class and showcase, is that I feel like this project could benefit from an addition of playfulness, in my method, concept and approach. Right now, the project feels constricted and too serious so I've had to put it down. This is related to the heaviness that me and many others are having to metabolise by telescopically witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the catastrophes in Congo and Sudan.
Before I put things down here are a few things I worked on:
Alice (thank you!!) guided me to this resource put together by Chia Amisola (who seems really cool and whose other work I really enjoyed diving into as I procrastinated). It is an async workshop which shows you how to make a website from a spreadsheet. I followed their tutorial on youtube and used their template to create this simple website on glitch.
This screenshot shows the html code editor on Glitch.com and a preview pane of the website next to it.
I created this website using the spreadsheet I created from my grandmother’s obituary which listed her descendants. Here is a portion of that spreadsheet:
Here is my grandmother’s obituary (the primary source for this information):
Here is a school project/presentation I made about my grandparents when I was very young (I’m unsure how onl, but not older than 10):
It included a picture of me and my grandmothers I hadn't seen in years:
I really enjoyed investigating my family’s past in this way. There’s always so much to learn and many surprises. For example I asked my mother to confirm the year her mother was born and she produced this message she got from her cousin when she was asking him this very question:
That’s all for now. I am planning to return to this project after my graduation in May, hopefully with a little more lightness and motivation.