Ancestry.com Project

For this project I chose to do a family that was not my own and I found it very time consuming, but also very fun. When doing this project it was interesting to put the pieces together and connect different sources of information together in order to create a more complete story. A second aspect of this project I enjoyed was that it helped to humanize the events we have been reading in the text book. When reading it is easy for the events to seem far removed and to not fully understand the emotional and human impact of them. An example of this can be found in the life of one of the family members I chose to follow. He was interned in Topaz Arizona simply because he was Japanese. While this sounds horrible, but the documents (or the lack of documents) helped me to see that he was untrustworthy of government authority because of his experience. By doing this project I was able to see history not in a general view, but in a way that is much more personal and honest.