Research Objectives: 

My research paper has several objectives that focus primarily on senses of community, family, nationality, and ethnicity. These factors are crucial in defining who someone is and contribute heavily to a persons’ identity. This analysis will help to identify through correlation if ancestry plays a part in identity by looking at these factors. There is a distinct gap in the current research about how constructing kinship maps affects these parts of identity, especially when the map is constructed of ancestors who have passed away. 

The first research objective of my paper is to determine if constructing a kinship map of someone in your ancestral community impacts senses of community, family, nationality, and ethnicity. In the United States, these values are held very highly in our culture, so, I am hoping to find if looking into your ancestral kinship changes this value positively or negatively. 

Along with this, I would like to determine if the impact of constructing the map on the American individuals can be classified as diaspora. Diaspora is a group of people who live outside their ancestral homeland yet maintain emotional and material ties to home. Despite the fact that the family being analyzed does not live in Europe, where they claim their ancestry is from, I want to find out if they maintain emotional and material ties to their European ancestry. 

And finally, I would like to determine if passing on generational symbols like names and stories can contribute to the sense of community, family, nationality, and ethnicity. My research will include field notes of any stories, names, or other things that are being passed down and I will determine if these things being passed down increase or decrease the values of community, family, nationality, and ethnicity. 

Lit Review: 

To begin my research, I wanted to focus on what Americans thought about Kinship and ancestry as a whole. As it turned out, from a peer-reviewed study, a majority of Americans do believe that knowing their ancestral roots is important (Jackson, 2021). Despite this fact, many people do not know it, even if they value it, leading to a dissonance between themselves. 

The literature I will be using addressed a distinct lack in Gen Z interest in ancestry and lineage (Maguire, 2023). I decided I wanted to focus on one family to analyze their feelings of connectedness to different variables of community. Of my participants there was one Gen Z, one Millenial, and two Gen X. These are the groups that are focused on in Maguire’s study so I believe that I can look at my own study and analyze if I come to the same conclusion.

Kinship is and has been passed down for generations through stories and artifacts. It is considered progenerative because so many parts of our social institutions are governed by it including peer relationships, wills, and even occupation based on our socialization with our kin (Schneider, 2021). An important reason why connectedness to ancestry is important is because it strengthens bonds between people (Kiser et al., 2010). So, if younger generations are not feeling the want or the need to be connected to their ancestry I want to figure out if constructing a kinship map would make a difference because this is where the gap was found.

Throughout my library research I have found that there is a gap in addressing how constructing family trees/ kinship maps of people that you know or are related to fosters a sense of community in people who are constructing them. So, I am aiming to help understand and fill this gap. Listed are other potential papers I may want to look at to better understand this gap and support my research. 

Method: 

I am taking a mixed methods approach to trace the genealogies of my great grandparents with the help of my parents and siblings. I am interviewing the people giving me the information on the egos and people participating in the mapping, which is my parents and siblings. Since I will also be helping to construct the maps, this will also be participant observation. The interview contains open ended questions on feelings of imagined communities like nationality, family, and ethnicity before constructing the genealogies and after. I can then compare and contrast the data to find the impact of constructing genealogies on people who know the subject of the map. 

Throughout this process I am keeping field notes of stories, common names, and other information that is being passed along about the members of the kinship map. I am using hand-written field notes that I will later transcribe onto my computer. Keeping note of stories, memories, and names will contribute to the analysis of how stories are passed down and how these may contribute to how senses of family, ethnicity, and nationality are built. Included in the field notes will be a recording/ transcript of the interview. It is in segments, doing two generations per weekend for the next two weekends.

I am choosing my great grandparents because they are deceased and over 100 years old, which means I can use their names in the paper, which is an important part of my research into analyzing sense of community. I believe that using people who are deceased also increases the likelihood of an impact being shown in the data because my parents knew my great grandparents when they were alive and typically when discussing dead people, others will bring up memories and stories as part of keeping their memory alive. I believe the participant-observer approach is best because I am analyzing my family. I believe that using an interview technique is also appropriate because I will have data to measure against one another. Finally, I believe that constructing a kinship map will be very beneficial because the gap in the literature is around how the construction of kinship maps impacts senses of community. 

Some constraints I may face is that there may not be complete data for four generations back from my great grandparents. In this case, I will have some blanks, but the idea is that my parents will be able to talk about the people that they knew, which should impact the sense of community, even if I don’t have everyone. Another drawback is that I will have a small sample size of participants from one family. This research may be better suited for larger numbers of people if it were to be applied to all Americans like I had hoped.

 

HO= constructing genealogies does not have an impact on senses of communities such as family, nationality, and ethnicity.

HA= constructing genealogies does have an impact on senses of communities such as family, nationality, and ethnicity.

Key definitions:

Nationality: an identification with a group of people thought to share a place of origin

Imagined community: the invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlie identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never all meet

Diaspora: a group of people who live outside their ancestral homeland yet maintain emotional and or material ties to home.

Kinship: The experience of being nurtured that all humans have – is not necessarily biological. For this project, all ties in Kinship are biological.

Ethnicity: A sense of historical, cultural, or ancestral connection to a group of people who are imaged to be distinct from others.

kinship Map: Maps the descent to an ego of ancestors and members of their kin.

Family: Imagined or biological community that someone deems close to them.

Ethical Considerations: 

I will construct an informed consent and have all of the participants sign it and include it in the final paper to show that I got informed consent and that the participants knew what my study was for and about. This informed consent will also ensure that participants know that participating is not mandatory and on a voluntary basis that can be withdrawn at any time. I will ensure confidentiality by labeling my participants with numbers (ie 1, 2, 3, 4…). I will also make distinctions in my participants for those that knew the ego (ie F1, F2…) and those that did not (G1, G2…) and separate their data as well.

I am interested in this research because in America, while many people were born in the United States and have lived here their whole lives and for generations before them, many people still feel a connection to places where their family immigrated from, even if they had never been there before. I think that this is an interesting phenomenon that relies on understanding your kinship so I am going to conduct this research on an American family to better understand these feelings of community. 

Findings:

First, I want to analyze the first set of answers I got to my survey. This analysis is important because it establishes the baseline to determine if there is a change in the sense of community from constructing a kinship map. In order to do this, I will label each respondent F1 and F2 for the two older members who knew the ego of the charts and G1 and G2 for the respondents who are younger and did not know the ego of the charts. This is an important distinction because it may change the amount of stories or information given by any participant based on how close they are in the line of descent to the ego. 

The overall results were mixed, strongly supporting the idea that senses of community are very individualized, even in close families, which all of the participants were a part of. 50% of the participants said that they knew a lot about their kinship, which were F1 and F2, the older members. The next oldest, G1, reported some knowledge, and G2, the youngest, reported knowing only a little. There are some notable parts about this statistic that I would like to bring to light. First of all, the older people knew more about their kinship, which supports the idea that stories and kinship ideas and maps are passed down generationally because they are the older group and they currently have all or most of the information about their ancestors and that they believe that it is very important (Schneider, 2021), (Jackson, 2021). Another notable part about this statistic came from my fieldnotes, where I note that G2 did not seem interested in conducting kinship maps and often did not pay attention, even though they admitted to not knowing a lot about their kinship, they were not interested in more. This is a worrying trend that I may want to explore more in a separate study of the Gen Z era and their knowledge and want for knowledge about their ancestry. According to a survey of Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X, Gen Z has a much weaker connection to the past and the past generations, even those who are living (Maguire, 2023). This concurs with what was seen of G2, a Gen Z individual who did not feel a strong sense of family. 

The answers to the question of nationality were mostly similar with all but F2 agreeing on American. F2 reported their nationality as French. This could be because of a misunderstanding of nationality, or it could be a sense of diaspora. F2 then reported the lowest feelings of nationality at 2 out of the scale of 5, whereas the other participants all answered 4 on the same 5 point scale. F2 feels a sense of nationality, while not strong, to a nation they do not live in and have not lived in which does support my idea that Americans may feel senses of diaspora. Many Americans report their nationality and ethnicity as one that their ancestors came from, so I believe that these findings concur with that conclusion (Cohn et al., 2021). Further supporting this conclusion, F2 is the only one who rated their connection to kinship a 5 out of 5 as opposed to the others who rated theirs 4 out of 5. 

Moving on to the question of community, these answers had some variation from participant to participant, but primarily the answers focused on people in the participants’ physical location such as neighbors, friends, and people who lived in the same town. F2, however, had a different answer again and focused on close friends and family, who do not live in the same area as the participant. I found this really interesting because F2 also feels a sense of connection to France. This led me to believe that F2 has a stronger sense of connection to family because they specifically listed them in their community. With this knowledge, it may begin to explain why they felt closer to their ancestral homeland of France. 

Along with the answer to this question, the answer to question eight was all the same across the board, standing at 4 out of 5 for all participants’ feelings of connectedness to their communities. I think that this makes sense because the communities they listed are ones that they interact with regularly and see on a day-to-day basis. 

Next, participants were asked to evaluate their ethnicity. This had three response groups. The first, people who categorized their ethnicity as white. White is not an ethnicity because it is not a cultural, historic, or ancestral category, but rather a physical characteristic, which would make it by most definitions, race. G2 and F2 both answered white. This leads me to believe that they stated this because they did not understand what ethnicity is. G1 reported Northern European, and F1 reported Welsh, English, and Bavarian, making sure to include “NOT EUROPEAN” in their response. England, Wales, and Bavaria are all in Europe so I believe that F1 was saying to not generalize all of Europe, which is a point that they made later while we were talking and constructing the kinship map. Generally, this shows a strong sense of ancestry and ethnicity from F1, and a mediocre sense from G1, with G2 and F2 having a lower understanding, despite F2 marking themselves as having a lot of information about their ancestry in their answer to question two. 

Continuing, when asked about members of the family, every respondent answered with direct lineage and blood. F1 and F2 both however specified people that they are responsible for and their in-laws. There may be an argument about age that could be made with more evidence and more studies on if older people consider non-blood to be their family more than younger people do as is the trend with this family. G2 only listed the immediate family members, not extended family members. This is conclusive with their response to the tenth question where G2 had the lowest sense of family at 4 and everyone else rated it at 5. 

At this point, I decided that to make my results the most meaningful, I would add “why” questions to the end of my second round of survey questions to get a better understanding and knowledge of the feelings and thoughts of the participants. These inner thoughts will help to clarify, strengthen and build on the conclusions developed in the earlier analysis of the answers to the survey questions.

Moving on, I would like to begin analyzing the field notes that I gathered while working on the kinship map. These notes are organized in two tables, table A and table B in Appendix A. Table A is what was said in terms of the genealogy, who said it, what the note is, and how it is classified in terms of stories, corrections, thoughts, and facts. Facts had solid proof (like newspaper articles) to concur, while stories were told orally from generation to generation. Thoughts were “I think” statements and corrections had evidence to support them, like an obituary or tombstone. Table B was my general observations about all of the participants and their relationship to the maps. 

Table A shows that most of my information came from participant F1, with only a few entries coming from F2, and none coming from either of the Gs. This is much easier to show in tandem with images 10-12 in Appendix B which demonstrates the amount of information and artifacts that were readily available when the question of constructing a kinship out 8 generations from the current generation came up. While some of these resources do belong to or came from F2, many of them were from F1 and their family over generations of collection. 

Concurring with the amount of information including news articles, death and birth certificates, and census reports, much of the information that was passed down about these generations was verifiable to be facts. For example, we utilized the Ellis Island record search to find that Stephen and John truly did come through Ellis Island in 1886, and the Ellis Island books included what age everyone was at the time they immigrated, which added new information to the kinship map which had previously been unanswered (The Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island, 2024). 

Being able to use online databases such as the Ellis Island registry or Family Search proved to be very helpful for filling in dates and events. The information F1 had compiled was from 2008, a while before many of these softwares came to be popularized and widely utilized. For this reason, I believe that having access to the internet does help to promote a stronger sense of kinship because of its ability to help connect the missing dots. However, while I and F2 viewed it this way, F1 viewed it as dangerous and was much more cautious about using it. In fact, they were so cautious that they would not let me write down an event or other information from an online database unless it included several sources on the page.

This skepticism was a predominant theme for F1, as they did not see a reason to use online tools, when they had physical copies of the information in front of them. This was noted in Table B as F1 consistently argued against the use of online tools, which is a valid concern considering how much they knew about their kinship, how long it took to compile it, and how protective they were of ensuring that their records were correct. For this reason, I believe that the skepticism was well intentioned and not meant to slow the process down. 

Despite the skepticism, there were many notable parts of the kinship map that stood out to me. First of all, there were two first cousin marriages, one in the second generation of Glen’s family (Image 3) and one in the fourth generation of Robert’s family (Image 10). While this may be seen as deviant and illegal in our current culture in America, this was the norm for some families at the time and was frowned upon much less. Taking a less ethnocentric look at the graphs helps to understand a lot of things, actually. For example, Evison is named after his mother’s maiden name. G1 was very confused by this, but with some explaining of Victorian culture, seemed to understand with time. 

Another notable piece of the kinship maps was all of image 4, which demonstrated that Glen’s ancestry truly did come from noble lineage, as F2 had claimed. There were tons of records such as land claims, wills, and knighthoods to confirm each person on that map and their dates, which are written on image 3. When discussing this with F2, whom the ancestry belonged to, they mentioned how validating it felt to know that the word of mouth stories they heard growing up did have some merit. 

Finally, I will analyze the responses to the post project survey which will indicate the difference in the senses of community if there are any. Starting with the first question after the name, people’s understanding of their kinship generally stayed the same or increased after constructing the kinship map. This did support my hypothesis that constructing a kinship map would change feelings of community, but I had to continue to analyze the other questions to get a better sense of the impact.

Answering about nationality, two of the participants, G1 and G2, both answered American during this round but for different reasons. G1 said it was because they could trace their roots back to the territories prior to independence in 1776, while G2 said it was because they were born here. F1 and F2 maintained their responses from before because that is where they trace their roots from when they go back as far as the records go. I thought that it was interesting that F1, F2, and G2 had the same reasoning but different responses and I am left to wonder why G2 stopped counting back in 1710~ and not further back like F1 and F2. I concluded that because they feel this connection to a homeland, continue traditions, and maintain symbols and artifacts from their ancestors who were from those homelands that F1 and F2 likely have diaspora. I further concluded that diaspora exists more prevalently in people with connection to and information about their ancestry. It, like many other things I believe, falls on a spectrum from some feeling of connectedness on one end and lots of feelings of connectedness with many artifacts on the other end.

Members of the community answered the same, which leads me to believe that community and kinship are not as closely related as I had thought when first beginning my preliminary research. Their reasons for community was that those are the people they interact with and can rely on across the board. Ethnicity also remained the same, despite discovering that in the second generation of James there was a black man. They did not claim this ethnicity because they have never practiced any of its culture like they have for Irish, French, and English heritages. 

The answer to the question about who was family also became more broad, including those in the bloodline for everyone across the board. F1, F2, and G2 all also included their close friends, which does follow with the definition of kinship. What is interesting to me about that is that they rated their senses of kinship generally lower despite including their kinship in their family. In a follow-up conversation, the reason for the lower ratings was that they do not know the people very well, and there is only so far that symbols and artifacts can go. 

On the reverse, senses of family were generally much higher, indicating that the kinship map did have a positive effect on senses of family. The reasons for the generally higher ratings was that they felt that they could rely on them and are close to them. This was very interesting to me, that kinship declined but family went up.

Something that was universal, was that everyone said that they found that constructing a kinship map was helpful for various reasons. Many of these reasons included clarity and simplifying old stories and helping them become fact, which was noted in Table A. Similarly, everyone noted that they learned something from the construction of the kinship map. What they learned was similar to how it was helpful, simplicity, clarification, and learning general information that they did not have before. 

Everyone’s concluding general thoughts were all positive about the project and how it was fun to work on for the family and as a family. This strengthens the hypothesis that working on a kinship project with family members about family members can create changes in senses of community. 

Conclusion:

 As found through my findings, all three of my research questions were answered and led to a solid understanding of the null hypothesis. I determined that while senses of community were very individualized, after constructing a kinship map these values did change and evolve as the individuals gained a better understanding of their ancestry. I also determined that what the individuals felt could be considered diaspora because they had artifacts from and identified with their ancestry. And finally, I determined that passing on artifacts and symbols does contribute to senses of community when constructing a kinship map because it helps to “put faces to the names.” After all of these conclusions were drawn I could finally address my hypothesis. In this case, the null was accepted and the alternative was rejected.