You should ask a relative who is two generations or more older than you if they

You should ask a relative who is two generations or more older than you if they would collaborate on a life history project with you. A grandparent would be ideal, but a great-grandparent or a great aunt or uncle will also be acceptable. Interviews do not have to be face-to-face (you can use FaceTime, Skype, or other non-written form of media). It is important to keep our elders safe in this pandemic; thus, we are not encouraging close contact but if you are going to meet them in person, use a face mask.
In the case that no relative is available, you should try to talk to a friend’s or neighbor’s grandparents.
The body of the project should be between six and eight pages in length – not including the cover page.
Format: Typed, using a size 12 font, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, and numbered pages.
You should upload your paper in the link provided under Assessment tab on Blackboard.
Cover page:
should have your name,
the name of the person you interviewed,
the interviewee’s place of birth,
some explanation of the interviewee’s relationship to you (genealogical charts are welcome)
the name of your TA.
You can write in the first person if you wish.
You should not make merely a description or transcription of the interview. You should turn in an ANALYSIS. In researching a life history, it will be important to develop a timeline of events in a person’s life.
The interview:
A good interview is the product of good questions. Ethnographers will often make up a list of questions they need to ask and carry it with them. This means you need to prepare for the interview before hand and have the questions you want to pursue already formulated. Further questions may occur to you as the interview progresses.
The best ethnographers use questions as guidelines for discussion, rather than trying to rattle through them in order.
Never let the interview exceed an hour. A half hour might be ideal. This means you will need to schedule several interviews — In addition to making the interview process less taxing, the period between interviews will give you time to digest the material you have collected and develop better questions.
You will collect much more information than you will actually use when you write your life history.
The interview’s analysis:
• Once you have carried out your interviews you will be faced with organizing a substantial amount of information. Simply reporting on what was said is not sufficient.
• Ethnographers have found that by identifying themes in a person’s life they can produce a coherent account that links events across time. These might be things like work, education or family, just to name a few. A key incident that shaped the life of the person can similarly link events across time, like migration.
• What you should perceive after the interview is how person you interviewed experience and feel about the events that have taken place in his/her/their lives. One thing you will discover is that the people you interviewed lived through momentous historical events but also smaller things that can be just as impactful. How did they cope with the rules society and culture imposes on people? How did they adapt to things like growing old, marriage or the death of a loved one? How were they changed by travel, work, or historical events?
We do not want to see bullet points or Q&A format. You should write an essay in academic format.