Personal Narrative: My Family History

For the past seventeen years of my life minus a few months, I have lived in the United States. I grew up skiing and bicycling in Grand Rapids, Michigan, until my family decided to move all the way out west to Flagstaff, Arizona. Many eleven-year-olds might become stubborn and defensive in response to such a massive, life-changing move, but I remember embracing it because I was with my family, and I was ready to face any obstacle that unveiled itself to me because I knew that my late comedic father, my worrisome mother, and my troublesome brother would be right by my side. As we made the two-day drive from Michigan to Arizona in our SUV together, we watched the numbers on the odometer crawl up more and more until there were 2,000 more miles on the car than there were when we started, and we

This year was my last year at The Little Middle School. Even though I’ve had a lot of speed bumps, I’ve accomplished a lot of stuff. From learning new instruments to working on my ability to focus, I’ve grown a lot.

My grandmother Lynne Murphy is who I chose to interview for my heritage project. This summer at a family birthday party I was speaking short phrases in Spanish while joking around with my dad. My grandmother, sitting beside us, joined in the conversation and starting speaking fluent Spanish. I had no idea she could speak Spanish, so I asked her, “How can you speak Spanish?” Before answering my question she laughed. She went on to tell me that she lived in South America for many years as a teenager. I didn’t have the chance to learn anymore about her childhood until this project was assigned. When I learned we were to focus on a family member’s experience growing up, I immediately thought about my grandmother and the interesting life she seemed

My initial reaction after talking to my parents about our health history was mind-boggling. I never took the time out to look into my family history. I am grateful to have the opportunity to take the time out to investigate my family health history. This assignment was extremely necessary and well informative. To begin with, after completing this assignment, I learned that my sisters and I are at high risk of diabetes and hypertension. Let us start off with my father’s side of the family since it is smaller compared to my mother. In addition, my father has diabetes and hypertension; he was diagnosed with those diseases about 8 years ago. His mother (my grandmother), had a lot of diseases such as; Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney stone, hypertension, cholesterol, heart disease, and blind in one eye. My grandmother suffered a lot and once she passed away we felt that was the best thing to have happened to her to end her misery. My grandmother ended up passing away in December 2013 at 85 years old. I didn’t get any information on my parental grandfather. My father, on the other hand, has hypertension, and diabetes and many of his cousins have a history of heart problem, murmur in particular. That explains why I was born with a heart murmur (which was resolved in 1995).

My family’s Native American heritage has influenced me by encouraging me to assist the poverty-stricken Lumbee community that I grew up in, whether that be by volunteering my time, energy, or resources. Growing up as a member of the Lumbee community, I have witnessed firsthand the struggles that many Native American families face, including living paycheck to paycheck, being ridiculed for our heritage, and alcohol abuse in many households. My culture has instilled in me the desire to educate the youth to be proud of their heritage despite the derogatory stereotypes that people associate Native Americans with. Unlike many children I was raised with, I have the opportunity to go to college and become only the second person in my family to do

Growing up with two different Heritages is like growing up in two different worlds, it was tough growing up being Native and Hispanic I would either get made fun of because I was Native or I was made fun of for being Hispanic. I guess you can say that I have somewhat of a different life, living with any Hispanic family but considering myself more Native, because just at home i just speak spanish, and eat amazing food made by my mother who isn’t even Hispanic who’s just Native American who didn’t consider herself Native American because she herself lived with my grandmother or she lived with a family friend who was Hispanic and showed her things about a culture that she didn’t know anything about.

After the initial shock and awe of finding out I was pregnant after 10 years of struggling and wondering if I would ever have the baby I had been dreaming of for so long, I began to plan every detail of my birth. I found a midwife and birth center when I was 8 weeks pregnant. I hired a doula at 12 weeks. My birth plan was written and finalized at 24 weeks. Every detail was planned-I had even planned the song that would be playing when my son would make his appearance. I'm a recovering control freak.

Family of origin work begins by having an individual or couple drawing up a "Genogram," a three generational map of family relationships graphically depicting such things as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and sibling order. The rationale for working directly with patients in this manner is described by prominent family therapist John Framo. "The client, by having sessions with his or her family of origin, takes the problem to where they began, thereby making available a direct route to etiological factions. Dealing with the real external parental figures is designed to loosen the grip of the internal representatives of these figures and expose them to reality considerations and their live derivatives. Having gone backward in time, the

My family originated from Zapotlanejo,Jalisco,Mexico. Both my grandma and grandpa from my father 's side grew up there. They had very little education but grew up being hard workers. When my grandparents got married they had four children in Mexico. It became hard for my grandparents to maintain all children when jobs were hard to find and payed very little. In 1962 my grandpa came to the united states looking for a job. He came to Southern California because he had family in the area. My grandpa found a job in Los Alamitos at a restaurant called Marie Callender 's as a cook and went back for his family. In 1963, my grandparents and their four children came to the United States. My dad was the youngest of them all he was barely a year. When they came here to California the immigration was not a huge problem so they were able to cross with no problems. When they came here my grandma was pregnant with one of my aunts,so when she was born they fixed papers for the whole family with her.

Many people have left legacies from when they were alive. Some are good, and some are bad. Those people may not agree with what they have left behind, and some may be perfectly okay with theirs. For me, I would like to leave behind a legacy that shows my family that I was a good person. I would want them to know that I had good intentions for my life and that I wanted to do good for myself and others. In this essay, I will explain what I would like my legacy to be like.

It became normal. I started to believe these names. If somebody called out, Tree, I would look around. In the barn scene, Kunta was getting ready to escape, and Fiddler was helping him after he was singing that lullaby. Kunta had asked Fiddler his name, his real name, and I have to admit, that moment was really emotional. Fiddler seemed to come to an understanding of how unbreaking Kunta was. I feel Kunta wasn’t built for a slave, his roots, his mindset, and his resilience wouldn’t allow it. This leads to him escaping, or trying to escape, many times. The first time he was bought by Samson, and the other times, he was caught by dogs. A very disappointing moment for me, because my nerves had built up while he was running, so when he was caught, I was extremely disappointed. It seemed to me, when he was escaping the second time, he was doing it not only for himself, but to Fiddler, and his family. Maybe even Jinna. At the end, where he was losing contact with his parents, was absolutely heartbreaking to me, because he is giving up. He was giving into his new identity, losing his

Sitting on the plane alone, I wondered what the next three weeks would bring. The light hum of the plane’s engines seemed to go on forever and the dry stale air began to scratch the inside of my throat. My destination was The Netherlands, where the entirety of my family lives. Throughout my youth seeing my family was a rare occasion, once a year if we were lucky, but after my parents divorced, we stopped going altogether. It had been over eight years since I had last visited them and because of the many years of separation, I felt uneasy about it all. Throughout the flight I couldn’t help but to think to myself several questions like: What I might be able to learn and experience from these next three weeks? How I would feel when I would first arrive? And how different everything would be. Having been there only a

My research family consists of five family members. Tanya is a 45-year-old African American woman; who works as a homemaker and provides beauty assistance to her local neighbors, such as being a make-up artist and a hair beautician. Tanya was raised in Louisiana in a single parent household, she has no recollection of her father nor did her mother ever mention his name. Her mother had a gambling problem, Tanya remembered her mother once gambling her brand new silver necklace her grandmother bought for her as a gift. At 17 Tanya went to live with her grandmother and refused to speak to her mother again. Mrs. Bell (Tanya’s grandmother) was on a fixed income and taking care of Tanya only added stress to the situation. “I couldn’t be a burden

The lives I would touch for my legacy would be my family and friends because those are the people that care about me and what I do. That they would help me out with anything I need. My major accomplishment would be a pro soccer player and go to Rutgers College. The other accomplishment in my life would be to get very good grades in school to get a good education.

I am a first generation child to have been born in my family, the first generation who is about to graduate high school and the first generation to go to a college and succeed in life.