Ancestry Tradition Essay

Often times a person lives their life based on how their own family would see it. Whether it disappoints or makes their family proud, it is inevitable; a person’s family will forever remain an important factor in their life, actions and the consequences that come with it. In “The Idea of Ancestry”, the author Etheridge Knight writes a poem where it is obvious that he is guilty of his actions and the shame and hurt it brings to his loved ones. Knight is haunted by the faces of his loved ones in his cell, and it is symbolic of the guilt he feels as he sits in prison and contemplates on his bad choices and addiction to heroin.

In my family, we have various traditions. The one i'm going to talk about is when we stayed awake through the twenty fourth all the way till midnight. Which was considered christmas. After I grew up, I asked my dad. “Why did we stay up at that time just to open presents”? His response was “You didn’t have school the next day and it was a old tradition you grandparents had when I was younger”. It was a tradition that was brought down from

The word family has changed so much in the past century. A family back in the 1950’s was probably considered a husband, wife, and one or more children. Times have changed and families have become much different. The Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others book defines family as a, “Unit made up of any number of persons who live in relationship with one another over time in a common living space who are usually, but not always, united by marriage and kinship” (Beebe, Beebe & Redmond, 243). Families can be broken up into five different types. The first is the traditional family, which includes a mother, father, and their biological children. Next, is the blended family which includes

This poem is titled “Heritage” and is by Countee Cullen (for Harold Jackman). The social issue that motivated Cullen to write Heritage is the oppression that blacks faced and their eagerness to go back to the place that their ancestors were taken from. In the poem Cullen reflects the urge to reclaim the African arts, during this time, the Harlem Renaissance, blacks called this movement negritude. Cullen depicts the negro speaking on the view of Africa, by the all negroes. In the poem, Cullen uses auditory imagery, organic imagery, and visual imagery.

I interviewed my grandmother. Her name is Sandra Sue Wardlaw. But I call her Mamaw. Mamaw was born in Dayton Ohio on July 25, 1938. She still lives in Dayton, but Brooklynn Dayton. Mamaws parents names are Roy and Ruth Strader. Roy is her dad and Ruth is her mom. Mamaw also has three sisters and one brother. Their names are Marcia, Cheryl, Lynn, and Jerry Strader. By now all of her sisters have married last names. Mamaw has lived all over Dayton Ohio. She attended Jefferson Township School System when she was in school. Mamaw is short and has grey hair. Sometimes she dies her hair blonde. She needs glasses to read and is very sassy.

My grandma Linda was her only daughter. I spent weeks at Ma’s house in Holstein, Iowa. Christmas for the Grell’s was always hosted at Ma’s house. When I was young she would take me swimming at the communities pool, and ice cream afterwards. Ma’ was an expert cook, her favorite summer dish was fried chicken. She was nearly famous for that fried chicken. In September of 2012 Doctors discovered a tumor in Ma’s liver. Ma’s children paid for an assisted living home in Sioux City, Iowa. She pasted away March 21, 2013. Leading up to March the relationship between my mother and her parents decrepitated. My grandparents refused to come to my high school graduation.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," the message about the preservation of heritage, specifically African-American heritage, is very clear. It is obvious that Walker believes that a person's heritage should be a living, dynamic part of the culture from which it arose and not a frozen timepiece only to be observed from a distance. There are two main approaches to heritage preservation depicted by the characters in this story. The narrator, a middle-aged African-American woman, and her youngest daughter Maggie, are in agreement with Walker. To them, their family heritage is everything around them that is involved in their everyday lives and everything that was involved in the lives of their ancestors. To

My mom was adopted as a baby and has always been curious about who her biological parents were and if she had any siblings. Upon receiving her permission, I began some light detective work using the two pieces of information I had: her biological mother’s name, Laverne Heikkila, and that she was from Newberry, Michigan. I took to the internet and was surprised to find that the surname Heikkila was more popular than one would think, but I did find a Laverne Heikkila from Newberry, Michigan on a thread on Ancestery.com. Not expecting much, I posted a message on the thread stating that I was looking for Laverne or any information about her as I believed I could be related to her. I didn’t hear anything back right away and eventually had forgotten

Stories told by a grandfather or an great aunt give a family its character, but no matter how much information you learn, there is always more; there are more adventures and more tragedy and more lessons. Hearing the stories of a relative’s experiences as a child, at high school, or how they raised their first child brings a family one step closer to that person and their family’s history. It is important to talk to family members and to record the stories of older relatives before they die and their stories die with them. The stories of the Coss-McDaniel family range from the humor of my dad being born in a bathtub to the tragedy of my Grandma Coss becoming paralyzed when my mother was only twelve.

We hugged, talked for a short while, and went to the Missouri Southern State University campus where the state police set up the morgue and a base of operations. My aunt called ahead to say we were on our way and when I walked in to their office, everyone stood up as a sign of respect. One officer took a short statement and led me to a room for DNA collection. When they learned that my Uncle Rick and my Aunt Jean, two more of my mother’s siblings, would arrive in Joplin that evening, they requested DNA for them as well, stating that three siblings and a daughter would almost guarantee

My grandma had survived a hard life, and yet managed to raise four responsible, well-educated, and successful children. All this she did while working as a respected psychiatric nurse and a state mental health board member. Although she had had and was still overcoming trials in life, I always knew she would be there and cared about me and my life. As my brother and I grew older and were unable to visit my grandparents as often as we

It was the end of the weekend. Her dad had been drinking a lot, so she decided to leave for the night with her friends. When she came back on Monday at dawn, he was sitting on her bed waiting for her daughter to enter the room and gave her a lesson that she would never forget. The next day she decided without telling anyone but her mother to leave the house and never come back, not until my grandfather would still be a part of this world. Weeks later, she

Michael Halloran (2004) proposes that culture as a diverse and complex system of shared and interrelated knowledge, practices and signifiers of a society, provides structure and significance to groups within that society which subsequently impact the individual’s experience of their personal, social, physical and metaphysical worlds (p.5). Halloran (2004) theorizes that cultural maintenance is key to increasing the health and well-being of Aboriginal Australians whereby he suggests that culture provides collectively validated ways to think of and value oneself, further arguing that culture helps to suppress fundamental human existential anxieties about social isolation produced by our mortality awareness. Emile Durkheim (Marks, 1974) identifies anomie as being without law or norms, similarly, D.J Spencer (2000)

It’s crazy to think that the way you were raised is what has made you become the person you are today. Everyone has their own story about how they were raised, where they were raised, and who they were raised with. Each person has their own type of heritage with how they are raised based upon their family, where they were raised, religion, family traditions, values, and beliefs. The way you were raised in life has influenced your personality. The way you act and the way you are viewed as are both influenced by your family’s heritage.

As a child, my family would celebrate every holiday with grandeur, especially Christmas. We have specific traditions and rituals that we carry out during the season, but the most important of our traditions is what we do on Christmas morning. Our rituals and traditions reflect our values as well as my own of family, unity, and tradition. The morning of the holiday my mother has always woken my brother and I, and then brought us to our dad so we could all walk down to the family room. As we gather in the family room around our tree and presents, my mom serves us each a piece of her Christmas casserole, saved for this special morning. Following our video-taped walk down to our presents, my brother, mother, father, and I open one gift from each other and the first thing in our stocking. After this ritual, my brother and I would go downstairs to our in-law suite where our grandmother lived, to wake up our Mimi and pull her upstairs so that we could finish opening presents and have hot chocolate with our entire family. One Christmas morning