RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Dolgellau on Saturday 22 January 05 03:26 GMT (UK)
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Enthused by recent family history programmes, such as Who do you think you are and Hel Achau on the TV my nine year old son’s teacher has given him a homework project to draw up a family tree over this weekend.
I believe that family history is a great way of teaching young people to have respect for themselves, for their family, their community and for their environment. So on the one hand I applaud Miss Jones for encouraging children in the pursuit of this hobby.
But I have some reservations
- My son can have a family tree that, literally, goes back to Adam and Eve (even further if you include God) by a click of a button from my computer. Other children might put in a damned sight more effort into the homework to get back to their grand parents. Their work will be overshadowed by the work that I have done over thirty years and to which my son has contributed nothing.
- It is much easier for the children of families who have their roots in this locality to do “original” research into their families than it would be for those who have moved into the area from other parts
- Despite the fact that I am descended from some of the great and the good (including many kings and princes) two of my great grandmothers were prostitutes and two of my four grandparents were “occupational hazards” from their mothers’ trade – I’m not sure that I want that sort of info given to my son’s teacher and I am worried that if the teacher knew about that part of the family background that she would treat and asses my son differently.
I have no problem with the elements of family history being taught by using, for instance, a local celebrity as a focus point, but I am uncertain about “personal” family history being pursued in schools.
What do other parents / grandparents (and even non-parents) think?
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I think that childen shoud be aware of their roots. The days when extended families all lived close by have gone in most areas, gone in fact in my lifetinme. I don't expect for one minute that she intended they should come in with a CD with the full package from Family Tree maker or whatever.
Perhaps what she really wanted was to make them look at where they fitted into the scheme of things. Don't they always tell us to ask relatives when we first start on family history? Drawing up a tree for 2 or 3 generations is a good way of starting to look at genetics. Who has blue eyes etc.
I am of the opinion that this sort of study may make children aware of the past and an understanding of it might make all the difference to the vandalism of cemetries war memorials and the like.
As a mother of 7 and grandmother of 10, I regularly amuse the younger ones with tales from my family history, and some are funny. Only when they are older can they appreciate how hard life was and the difficult choices people had to make.
Both my grandmothers died in their early forties from lead poisoning, a hazard of hand filecutting. Most of their children died in infancy. There's more to be learned from this than dressing up and being Victorian schoolchildren. Some of my ancestors died in the workhouse, some in the local asylum. Some were in prison, some quite wealthy, some brave, some idle and shiftless. I am not ashamed of anything they did or had to do, and I think you should take the same view.
Let thew lad draw up a tree from the people he knows. In a few years time he could be Rootschtting with the rest of us.
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As a former history teacher, I did a bit of family history with some classes, but very warily. I knew from my own experience (my father deserted the family when I was 6 and I knew nothing at all about him) that there were children for whom it would be impossible as well as painful. Many children couldn't come up with any information about their fathers. There could be real problems in some homes if they even asked. I was glad to plant a seed of interest in some children and leave it at that. It's better to teach real social history and thus give children the tools to find out about their own roots if they want to. I took classes to the Local Studies Library to show them how to use censuses and old newspapers. If I were teaching now I would be using the Mitchell and Kenyon films. If teachers are using the current interest in family history, I hope they are sensitive to the problems they can cause.
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As a history teacher too I would completely agree with suttontrust. There are many ways you can inspire children to find out more about social history, local history and their culture and heritage but to ask students to research their own family history is too personal and difficult for some. It's quite possible though to show some of the ways you would go about researching family history. When we used to study WW1 we would look at the local war memorials and then research some of the names on them using the local history library and the internet and I would explain how you would use the same methods to find out about your own family history.
Like suttontrust there were aspects of my experience which I dreaded coming up when I was in school so maybe that makes you more conscious of not causing your own students to experience those same problems.
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I'm with Suttontrust and Louisem on this one - Someone could be opening 'several cans of worms' with this one.
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Hi
I am Chair of Govs in the local Primary school and I am also Gov who is connected to History & Geography. I often take the children on trips to the local village and Church where we discuss lots of things we see, among which are;
Local gravestone which details the life of a Crimean soldier buried there,
Sizes & shapes of fields (on our walk to the Church across the fields),
The houses,
The old Post Office, (now a house)
The old Pub, (now a house)
The old Blacksmith's, (now a house) Do you notice a pattern emerging?!
Farms
Cottages
Outside toilets now sheds
Roads & tracks
Sundials,
etc etc etc etc
I agree with the others, to use the children's families can be very intrusive so I use local people like the Crimean veteran, his mother emigrated to Australia in the 1830's etc etc
The opportunities for teaching most lessons are there on the doorstep it teachers want to use them
If any teachers want to contact me for ideas I will be very pleased to help.
Teddybear
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I too think it is very important to teach children about their roots. In fact, I did a family history project when I was in primary school. However, I agree with the notion that this is not a very good idea as it can be embarrasing and painful for some children. I think it is much better to do something similar to what teddybear suggested. I would use a local war memorial, for example our Boer War with 18 names, and give each child aperson to research. This would be against the background of lessons on the Boer War. You could teach them to use the 1881 census and the 1901 census and local newspapers etc.
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I think that many of the children could not possibly be interested as their roots are in countries far away. It could be offered as a Club after-hours. All schools have computers and internet access today. That way only those who had a real interest would attend. On the other hand the question would arise as to who would pay for all this. I remember Charles Clarke, when Minister of Education, making a speech about teaching chess at schools - the Government was 100% behind it but - a large BUT - they would offer no funding for it ???
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Interesting subject. I have actually published a booklet for teachers to use in the classrooms. The National History Society has taken quite a few copies of the booklet.
I think for children to learn about their roots is important. I did history at school and hated every minute of it, there was nothing interesting in the American Revolution. Like when would I ever of used that subject in my life time? Never.
If family history was in classrooms when I was at school that would of made it more interesting to learn on two levels: personal and social. By doing their family tree they then in the process learn about history in general as well as their own family history.
It will develop research skills and give children confidence in approaching big projects, with an eye for detail because of the importance of spelling.
It would also provide the opportunity for children and parents to interact and encourage communication
More and more schools over here are now starting to bring family history into the classroom. Yes there may be some children who feel uncomfortable if they haven't a father figure etc but they still have family roots but teachers could help them along the way
Before I did the booklet I did actually go to many schools and get the childrens comments on family history. Many of them loved the idea....with comments like “maybe I have a famous person in my family some where”. One child came up to me and said "my Gt Gt grandmother was a housekeeper in a big house" and she was so proud of that chest stuck out it was so cute.
As for funding have fundraising events at the school specifically for family history, which would also get the families involved.
Shanko
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I appreciate what Shanko is saying, but with all my teaching experience I still wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Indeed, I'm told that some LEAs forbid it anyway, because of the problems it can cause.
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I have two pre-school children and I must admit I am more concerned about them being taught to read and write properly. My step son has just passed his A-levels, he has handwriting that is illegible and would be lost without his spell checker! (At his own admittance.)
Family history could be combined with history lessons, as others have already suggested, but not necessarily centred on the families of the children.
For children to learn that we all come from different backgrounds and places and have different family structures can't be a bad thing if handled correctly. Maybe it would help them become more tolerant and less judgemental as adults.
tabitha
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It is a non starter, as far as i am concerned, because today in this country {England} there are so many one parent families, the poor kids can not even, go back as far as a father, unless they just did their mothers line, it would be to embarrasing for some children,.so as previous rootschatters have said, dont make history personal.regards nora T
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I was going to do an evening on Family Trees with my Brownie Pack...but after reading all your thoughts I can see that it just wouldn't be appropriate. I will check out the War Memorial and graveyard for inspiration.
Teddybear, I like your idea...been thinking of doing something like.
Thanks for the ideas everyone.
Nellie
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I think we are the wrong group to ask about this. Obviously we have an interest in the subject, but what about the general public? I can cite my own brother as a classic example. When our father died recently and he went to register the death, he didn't even know where his own father had been born. I don't think he is untypical, so for this reason and all the other very valid reasons given earlier, I would support the use of a third party as the subject for the research.
We came up with a fairly interesting example in my own village. On the Roll of Honour website, there was a description of one of the WWI casualties that made me wonder why he was on our war memorial when there didn't appear to be any link to the village. Later, when I was transcribing marriage records, I came across the record of his daughter whose father's details were clearly given as a WWI fatality. I contacted the Roll of Honour people who were more than happy to get the story right and did some digging. It turns out this lady is still alive and her daughter serves lunches to my children at the school. She gave me some information and we found that her grandfather was the brother-in-law of another fatality, a link not known about. In digging about in the parish records, I managed to trace the family back to a birth in 1609. This would be an excellent example from which the children could learn and would not cause anyone any embarrassment (as long as the people concerned were happy to go along with this).
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Wow, I'm almost a year late on this one, but I'll comment anyway....
How about giving children the CHOICE of doing either their own family, or another person's family? That way, if kids are embarassed about their own line (or if they just find their own line too boring), they can pick the Royal Family, the Kennedys, or some other person who had a more interesting, unique line.
In my university-level Anthropology class, we were doing a kinship study, and our prof showed us how to diagram family trees, showing various variations, e.g. divorces, multiple (consecutive and concurrent) marriages, etc., and challenged anyone to come up with something she'd not shown. Someone very proudly stood up and said, "my uncle had a wife and they had three kids, one in wedlock, one before, then he divorced her, and my other uncle married her, had kids with her, then divorced her, and the other uncle married her again. How do you diagram that?" (The prof, for the record, was momentarily stumped, as the kids would be both half-siblings and cousins simultaneously).
Even though this is a university level class (by no means exactly comprable to a primary school classroom), it goes to show that even a family embarrassment can peak the interest of people who are otherwise totally disinterested in history beyond what happened yesterday. Beyond that, it may be an interesting social fact that some children cannot do a family tree. We can incorporate this into a study of a changing society (e.g. our ancestors may have been very interested in this, but we don't necessarily care; we may be very interested in fashion, whereas they couldn't have cared less, etc.)
Beyond that, I think we should question what we really want to get out of a lesson such as this.... Looking at the Grade 8 syllabus for this province for English (that's what I'm currently teaching), related points this would cover include...
a) Students establish personal connections to their reading
b) Students use technology effectively
c) Students use the library catalogues efficiently
d) Students can do tasks in chronological order
e) Students can present information in various written formats
f) Students can explain how they determine fact from fiction
g) Students can critically analyse information
i) Students can cite their sources
Clearly, by assigning a family tree project, one is covering a lot of ground (even in Grade 8 English, and I imagine a whole lot more will be covered by assigning it to a Social Studies class).
In this century of political correctness, I realise we try not to offend anybody. But anything we do will be offending SOMEBODY. (Teaching the Anglo Boer War from a British perspective to a South African of Dutch descent can be offensive, as can the whole of WWII to a German immigrant).
Basically, as long as we can point out that we are not necessarily anything like our predecessors, we're doing fine. (Oh, and for the record, I've not yet assigned this to any of my classes...)
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Hi Magistra
Having read your reply...I agree...we can't please everybody and as i am interested in this I WILL get my Broownies to do their Family Trees like you said...they can choose someone else if they wish.
Great...now I can combine 2 passions...
Thanks for the idea
Nellie
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I suppose this will keep cropping up, because it does seem such a good way of teaching both history and research skills. However, good teachers will, I hope, back off where they know their children well enough to understand how it will affect some of them. It is not an answer to say that if they can't do their own trees they can do someone else's. You have already put the child into the horrible position of wondering why he doesn't know who his father is. Nellie, the fact that family history is a passion for us shouldn't blind us to the implications for other people. I would just stress again, be very careful.
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Like Magistra I missed this thread earlier and I am amazed at the naivety of the answers.
There is not one class in any school in any country of the world that every pupil does not know the details of the family situation of every other child in the class.
(A bit extreme yes, but you get my drift. The children are aware of each others lives & situations)
Any teacher that thinks otherwise should not be teaching as they are blinkered.
Family history in schools is the perfect way to break down the prejudices that could cause the anguish in students, sweeping the facts under the carpet as if they are some dangerous secret is guaranteed to store up problems for that child as he/she is exposed to the world on leaving school.
Family history if taught properly is the only subject needed to practically fully educate a child.
It covers -
Reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, languages, social science, biology etc. etc.
It encompasses history, social history, local history, wide aspects of law, economics, archeology music and a thousand and one other subjects to turn self-righteous bigots into fully rounded useful members of society who can appreciate every eventuality thrown at them.
Cheers
Guy
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Guy,
I certainly see what you mean.
But Magistra,
I think you have it spelled out brilliantly.
A few tries on "important" people will soon show your school class how simplistic the whole idea of "important" is! And let's hope they will proceed from there and start to research less "important" people including their own ancestors.
Of course, a few pupils will have started immediately with researching their own ancestors - and those are the ones who will soon start involving their classmates.
And, as the "important" lot will already have found some 'scandals', eyes might well have been opened ...
Though not sure what, if you are in some English village which hasn't changed much, the discovery of one's ancestors being vassals to the still present Lord of the Manor might mean!!!
JAP
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I taught for 20 years. I taught in some of the most deprived wards in the country. Do not, please Guy, call me blinkered. Yes, the children often know each others' circumstances. But those circumstances are often very painful and complex. I speak as one whose father cleared off when I was 6 and I found it easier to say he was dead. There are children living in mixed families where neither adult is their biological parent.
Okay, I can't stop you. I will just say that there are many good ways to teach history without risking the sort of damage this can do. And the sad part is that you may cause tremendous hurt and never know it.
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Likewise my father too and yes it was easier to say he was dead, not because it was painful but to avoid the sympathy. When one said he was dead more often than not the adult would find another victim to sympathize with as they were so embarrassed at broaching such a subject with the poor dear.
But there again I was in an environment where many of the kids would perhaps not see either parent from one years end to the next or only see one or other for a week or two.
Facing facts never hurt any of them secrets did.
Talking in hushed tones of illegitimacy leads to the illegitimate child feeling that they have done something wrong because their parents never married.
Open discussions about such facts lets the child see they are not alone it is simply another fact of life just as some children have parents of different nationalities. Some children's fathers are doctors some are binmen, some parents work some don't.
Facts of life when spoken about openly don't cause anguish & pain, but when whispered as secrets cause misery.
Cheers
Guy
Forgot to add.
I have had adoptive children write to me asking how to research the family history of their adoptive parents as they are the parents who mean more to them than their blood parents. Some mention they are luckier than most as their parents chose them rather than just accepted an accident of birth.
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Guy, I don't think we need to quarrel, but we have to disagree. I am not only talking about myself (I didn't know I was illegitimate until I was 21, and if I'd gone home from school and asked about my father it would have caused great problems) but about the children I've known over the years who didn't know about their family background and simply could not have asked. The children are not keeping secrets - the parents are, for a variety of reasons which teachers have no right to intrude on. Facing facts? Who is being asked to face facts, and at what stage in their lives? And what right do unrelated adults have to demand that those facts are faced?
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Nothing wrong in disagreeing, accepting that others hold different points of view is a basis of learning.
I was born after my mother's marriage to her second husband, my eldest brother was infact a half-brother being the son of her first husband. My middle brother is illegitimate being born before the marriage of our father to our mother and my sister after.
My mother was even mentioned in a book about her first husband in a very uncomplimentary manner, but that was never kept a secret from us.
We as adults have a duty to children - all children - that they are not punished for the actions of their parents.
I feel very strongly that that duty involves displaying that there is no shame in being born out of wedlock.
I remember the days when condoms were secretive things talked of in whispers and euphemisms. How much better it is today when condoms are displayed in garages, chemists etc. instead of being hidden away. They have changed from being dirty objects of derision to acceptable items.
The pain I see comes in emails and letters I get from people who have been told of their illegitimacy later in life often only after their biological father has died and that has destroyed their relationship with their mother and "adoptive" father as they feel they have been lied to.
Cheers
Guy
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It would be lovely to be able to do this sort of thing in school, but as a teaching assistant who often has to 'pick up the pieces' when children are upset, I think that asking young children to look into thier own family history could be a really risky idea,especially in a primary school. Not only do some children not know who their father is, what about those who are adopted, or, as in my own case, have a deceased parent when they are still very young? I would have been devastated to be asked to produce this kind of homework..much too painful and probably even more difficult after my father remarried.
Needs a very careful approach.
Carol
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I had my Grade 9s do a family tree a few weeks ago. They're reading a novel about someone who wants to find out who her parents are, and from where she comes.
The instructions to the students were to find as much information as they could about their relatives, and not to be embarassed by anything they unearthed. (I gave some particularly odd details about my own relatives to preface this).
Absolutely everyone in the class completed the assignment without protest. As usual, some kids did FANTASTIC work and marvellous research, while others were able only to find the dates of birth of their parents, and were feeling pretty proud of themselves when they named all their cousins by name.
One girl was initially not keen on the project, explaining that her mom had ten siblings, and all led complicated lives. I told her to find out as much as she could, and maybe do five relatives in detail. Contrary to my wildest expectations, she and her mom got so involved in the project, that she made a MASSIVE poster of all her relatives back five generations! She says that her whole famiy is suddenly very interested in genealogy, and over Spring Break, she and her mom are making a scrap book.
So, happily, no harm done, and all students did very well on the assignment, regardless of how elaborate their findings were.
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Magistra
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Hi Magistra
So pleased that your class took to the idea and enjoyed it.It's always great to hear about parents becoming involved, especially since I work in an area where lots of parents would much rather be in the pub or doing drugs.
I can only speak from my own experience,(not of booze and drugs, I hasten to add) so am rather biased I'm afraid.
I think that genealogy in general is a fantastic thing (obviously!) to teach in schools but would always offer the children the opportunity to research someone other than their own family, for the reasons I mentioned in my last post.
Lastly, well done ;) for being enthusiastic enough to want to share your knowledge of the subject with your class and not being 100% bound by what the curriculum demands!! ::)
Carol
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hi i must very strongly suggest you take heed of suttontrust,i work with children who are (damaged)(vunrable).
for example some parents are in prison or they children are under local care.
there is drug abuse and drink.
children with incest in there background.
and no children dont know everything about there classmates.
some things are kept hush hush.
searching for a local hero past sounds good though.
but this must be handled with the utmost care.
or vunrable children could feel even more isolated than they do already.
dwalin
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I am a teacher too. Years ago I tackled the family tree just to great-grandparents with a young class, and even then there were issues, naturally....but being unmarried and therefore not divorced at the time, I was not aware of the issues until the project had begun.
I would love to foster this wonderful hobby in children of today, but I think a much more appropriate way of dealing with some of the more painful facts that present themselves to today's families, would be to set the children the task of choosing ONE of their parents to research.....starting from that parent and naming grandparents and so on, leaving OUT marriages (or not) of any kind for the chosen parent. That would alleviate a fair amount of the problems of recently divorced family.
Yes I am aware it would not entirely erradicate discomfort, as grandparents can divorce too....but for the more recent, and therefore more painful reminders to those students who are from divorced families (or illigitimate OR one mum-four kids-three dads, etc etc....) I think it would be a better way to introduce this topic.
I do know the problems that can be caused firsthand, as my son did a family tree at school a few years ago after his father had left and had recently remarried. I DID find it painful to have to go over that on the tree, but my son solved it for me by stating that he only would enter me and his father, not the new wife, whom he did not accept at the time anyway since he had never met her. It didn't alter the purpose of the exercise so that is how we did it and it was fine....but yes...painful.
Nina
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Can I suggest that the aim, for teachers, is to teach children how to research. Family history is a means to that end and, for all the reasons I and others have given, not a very good one. There are other ways of doing it, and researching a local hero is one. But what we are trying to do is show them what resources are out there. Years ago, pre internet, I arranged for a class to pay a visit to the local studies library. It helped that I knew the librarian. She laid on an exhibition of the resources - old newspapers, maps, census fiches etc. We looked up the 1851 census for the address of one of the kids. We looked in the newspaper indexes for some of their names and found some articles. The best comment on the day was from a child who said, "I thought it was going to be really boring but it wasn't."
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As an interested lurker and parent to this thread, I read all the "warnings" advising not to subject children to doing a family tree because they might be embarrassed.
What age children are we talking about? 6 thru 8 year olds? Or 16 thru 18 year olds? Of course the little ones dont need to know this stuff yet. They too busy learning the local history and the 3 Rs.
So far the only thing I have taught my 3 year old is how to say the word GEN-E-A-LO-GY ;D
I loved what Magistra did and waited until the kids were older - High School - and then teach them how to do the family research.
If I were teaching Family history (and while I am not a teacher - I would be interested in teaching people in a community setting) I would probably put a lower limit of age 16. That way they can deal with whatever they find without being ostracized by their peers.
But thats just my opinion.
Burrow Digger
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Yes, I am very fortunate indeed to be teaching at a very well-off school, where parents are almost all professionals and in upper-income brackets, in traditional nuclear-type families with few irregularities (which in itself is an irregularity, I suppose!) I also didn't ask kids to indicate if their parents were divorced. They didn't need to show that their real parents were not the ones living with them. And if they chose to lie about their relatives (e.g. say that their step-parent is their real parent), there's no way I could really have known.
The curriculum requirements I was trying to fulfill were not accurate historical research, or how to do research and cite sources. Rather, the standards I had to fulfill state "students will relate literature to their life events" and "students will transcribe information from oral, written, and technological resources into various tables, charts, and other formats." Currently, the educational buzz-words are "cross-curricular" and "interdisciplinary integrated approaches." And so the family tree held its appeal for these reasons.
(True, I could have told students to write a paragraph on how they feel about their novel, to draw a timeline of the main events of the novel, or research the author's biography, but they've done all that before - by Grade 9, these are boring to them. So while I recognise there were alternate ways to fulfill these standards, I took the chance, and am pleased I did IN THIS circumstance.)
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My love of the family tree started with a project when I was 12 years old - I still have my original project in with all my notes and research.
I think that learning about our roots gives a feeling of belonging!
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My nephew (age 10) has recently done a history project about family history and of course he came to me for some help. I didn't do it for him though.
Sadly I think I went over the top though because after going all the way through the tree back to 1400 he was asleep! Can't imagine why. ;D
His project seemed to be about trying to fit in themselves and their family with the history they had been learning generally ie the tudors, the victorians etc. He now knows that history didn't only happen to kings and queens and important people, it happened to his family as well.
Quite good I thought.
Kerry