For our final project, we were assigned the task of learning about our family history and creating several projects to demonstrate our knowledge. To gain some background information on my mother's side of the family, I conducted a 25-question interview with my grandma, Kathleen Best. In this interview, she gave me the names of her parents and grandparents and the birthdays of almost every family member on the Best side of the family. She also explained her love for music and piano and how she feels that she passed her love of music to her grandchildren.
In a separate interview I questioned my father, Daniel Farnan, about his childhood. He grew up in Richmond, Missouri as the youngest of 11 children. He explained to me some of the challenges he faced with such a large family including having to share everything and not getting along with his siblings. He also said that his large family taught him valuable life and people skills and made him appreciate his mother that much more.
To help me with the rest of the projects, I sent an email to my grandmother and asked for help finding information about our family heritage and pictures of all our family members to use in my presentation. She provided me with nearly all the pictures I used in this project, as she had hundreds of old pictures laying around her house.
With all this background information I had collected within both sides of my family, I was able to complete a thorough family tree. I was not able to trace my family back very far, but with the help of my dad and grandma I was able to include every single living relative I know and trace my family back to my great-great-great grandparents on the Best side and my great grandparents on the Farnan side.
With the information that my grandma and my mother provided me with, I was able to finish a prezi consisting of mainly my mother's side of the family. I was not able to include all of my dad's family because I did not have near as much information about them. Instead I included a lot of information about each of my relatives on the Best side of the family.
After the completion of the prezi, I was able to display my knowledge of my family's heritage through an infographic. I included the countries of origin for both the Best and Farnan families as well as where my family members currently live and some hereditary diseases on both sides of the family.
Through this project I was not only able to demonstrate my knowledge of the online tools we have been using in Emerging Technology all semester, but I was also able to learn a lot more than I previously knew about my family history. It was a very interesting project for me to complete and I now know much more about where my family and I came from.
