Over the holidays, try talking to your relatives like an anthropologist

[Judi Lynn]

Published: December 16, 2022 8.14am EST

How is it possible to spend so much time with your parents and grandparents and not really know them?

This question has puzzled me as an anthropologist. It’s especially relevant for the holiday season, when millions of people travel to spend time with their families.

When my parents were alive, I traveled long distances to be with them. We had the usual conversations: what the kids were doing, how the job was going, aches and pains. It wasn’t until after my parents died, though, that I wondered whether I really knew them in a deep, rich and nuanced way. And I realized that I’d never asked them about the formative periods of their lives, their childhoods and teenage years.

What had I missed? How had this happened?

In fact, I had interviewed my mother a few years before her death. But I only asked her about other relatives – people I was curious about because my father’s job had taken us to places away from the rest of the family. I based my questions for my mother on the bit of information I already had, to build a family tree. You might say I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I decided to research the kinds of questions that would have elicited from my mother things about her life that I had no clue about and that now remain hidden and lost forever. I interviewed older people to develop questions that would paint a vivid picture of a person’s life as a child and teenager. I wanted details that would help me see the world that had influenced the person they became.

More:
https://theconversation.com/over-the-holidays-try-talking-to-your-relatives-like-an-anthropologist-195637

[pandr32]

1. Excellent idea.

I already ordered the book.
Thank you for posting this.

[Solly Mack]

2. I did that with my mother. Asked all manner of things about her childhood and what it was

like growing up the baby in the family of so many sisters. I asked her how she felt about her parents and siblings. Things about her teenage years. Her young adult years. Her first love. All kinds of things.

After she died, I still had more questions.

Never enough time.

Still, I was glad I asked her all those questions.

[mgardener]

3. I just ordered it

My dad died when I was 10.
He would not talk to me about his experiences in WW11.
The only thing I remember him saying is " never volunteer".
I found out years later that he volunteered as a senior in high school.
Any boy who did that automatically graduated.

[Tree Lady]

6. Right before my father died in 2000

He told my daughter's boyfriend who had just joined Air Force stories about him being in the war. I had never heard any of these stories.

One story was he was a gunner and he watched his best friend another gunner on other side of him get killed. I'm Sorry he couldn't share this pain.

Or the time in basic training where he got so drunk his friends tied him to a pole so he wouldn't get in trouble.

[Rhiannon12866]

4. I was really lucky, I was close to my grandmother, visited relatives with her and heard the stories

But I lost her in 1998 and there are still so many questions I wish I'd asked.

[GreenWave]

5. I already do.

Good morning Propliopithecus!

[Judi Lynn]

7. You talkin' to me? (Robert DeNiro)

[GreenWave]

13. I stopped calling my relatives Ramapithecus (which they seemed to like)

once they left our branch to join the orangs.

[cachukis]

8. Sharing with my friends and relatives; for their children as well.

[samnsara]

9. my hubby recorded his moms oral history.. she passed at 104

Altho I didnt do that, I did ask my father ( who was struggling with Parkinsons at the time) about his time in Korea. We were watching MASH and I asked him about the MASH units he saw when he served. Im glad I did. I remember mom looking at me and smiling..she was saying 'thank you'...

Both passed about 18 months later...

[nuxvomica]

10. My parents grew up during the Depression

So I had heard all about what life was like then, mostly to underline the fact that my life was easier than theirs had been. And it had the desired effect: I believe in social and economic justice and don't understand why other people don't.

[erronis]

11. Based on your title, I thought this would be about analyzing our RWNJ relatives.

Nice probing questions about what do you like/hate? Why do you hate so much? Do you have any facts to back up your rantings?

Stuff like that....

[oldfart73]

12. Write the info on the backs of your pictures.

[Warpy]

14. I would have had to interview them more like a psychiatrist

I knew a lot about how my mother grew up surrounded by psychos. My dad didn't talk much about his formative years but I did read the diary he kept in 1931 when he was a teenager hustling pennies and nickels for movie and baseball money. He and his brothers were known around town as "those hellions."

I did get to know them as people, but it took uninstalling the buttons they loved to push. Once they realized those buttons didn't work any more, they relaxed into being themselves. It was a gift.

Anyway, neither had a leg to stand on when it came to criticizing my own teenager from hell years. They knew it and I knew it.