Interview members of two generations of the same family about their family stories

Interview members of two generations of the same family about their family stories

For this assignment, you are to interview members of two generations of the same family about their family stories. They cannot be members of your nuclear family but they could be related to you, for example, an aunt and a cousin. The goal is to find out what stories have been told and retold in this family and what significance they hold for the family members. You can use the questions on the family folklore questionnaire as a starting point for the interview and supplement those questions with your own – try to get as many stories as you can. You should also try to find out the context for telling these stories (who tells them usually, on what occasions, for what reasons).

You may interview the family members together or separately, but either way, your focus should be on what story(ies) each person knows, what are the predictable parts of the story, and how their perspectives are similar to or different from each other. Try to figure out what function these stories might fulfill in the family, linking your discussion to the functions we talked about in class (teaching moral lessons, connecting the generations, shaping identities, entertainment or something else).

Length: 1000-1200 words (give word count). Essays should be well-organized and grammatical with transitions connecting paragraphs and sections.

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