Starting Early: One Teen’s Path Into Indian Family History

Keerti's tree on Ancestry

Keerti at our virtual interview

With the smell of her mom’s spices in the background, we met Keerti, an energetic teenager who is going places. She was interested in her family’s history, and we made a date to get her started.

She set up a free Ancestry account and began building her tree immediately. She has plans to travel to India in a few months, so we did some brainstorming on what she could do to maximize her time with relatives there.

App hints:

Get the framework of the tree set, add photos to the tree,  start to add cousins and aunts and uncles. Be familiar with the app and how it works so that using it in the moment (with other family) will be seamless.

I recently learned about an anthropologist named Elizabeth Keating, who frames questions to ask our relatives that are more sensory and more inviting, encouraging them to remember themselves and not just facts.

I shared with Keerti the ideas behind these questions and this approach.

Keerti looked at her small, growing tree and decided that she wanted to focus on both of her grandmothers and her great-grandmother, who is in her 90s. She will be spending time with them in March when she travels back to India. These women didn’t have the same opportunities, options, or choices that she does in her life. That intrigues her.  We narrowed the questions she may want to ask them. We also talked about how to add audio and photos to an Ancestry account. I challenged her to play with these features before she is in the moment.

The recording option only allows 14-minute increments, and if you are recording someone in the moment, there is a fast way to restart a recording. Keerti needs to practice this before she has her great-grandmother in front of her.

Recording and interviewing hints:

For some reason, recording on a road trip has always been the best time for me. There is nowhere else for them to go, people usually like talking about themselves, and they aren’t looking straight into your eyes.

It is also a good idea to start recording yourself immediately when you talk about the interview.  Be very casual and just start recording in front of them. Just talk, and they will see it isn’t a formal interview but a casual conversation. You can always delete the recording in the future or keep it. (FamilySearch has unlimited recordings in 5-minute increments. Ancestry has 14-minute increments and is limited for free users.)

Check out the Ancestry page for adding media

When the questions start, instead of making it an interrogation of facts, help them remember their earlier lives—rather than drilling them on facts they may not remember well. Choose your first question carefully: low-pressure, easy, and fun to answer. Then ask factual questions if you need those afterward.

After looking over sample questions, she chose two that most intrigued her:

• What do younger generations misunderstand about your time?

• What sacrifices felt normal then but seem large now?

She is going to practice using the app, get more information, more photos and be ready to document everything and everyone when she goes to India.  Including family homes, spiritual practices, foods and family!

After spending time with Keerti and the sample questions I had chat gpt help me come up with, I found a question I love.  I will ask every person I interview in the future:

If you could be carried back into your family’s history, to one ordinary day long ago, where would you find yourself—and what would you hope to see, hear, or understand?

Keerti said she would love to go back, not too long ago, to when her parents were deciding to leave India, and she wished she could hear the conversations. She wanted to hear their reasoning and hear her grandparents’ ideas as well. It is touching that a teenager is most interested in a moment of decision involving her own living parents.

This goes right along with what I always say: our lives are interesting to our descendants and relatives. It isn’t only the faraway past they are interested in. Your life matters, your experiences are interesting, and they are worth saving for those who come after you.

Stay tuned in a few months to find out how Keerti's trip went and how her grandmothers' answered the quesitons.

If you are interested in learning more ideas from this anthologist here is an article written by Elizabeth Keating:https://theconversation.com/over-the-holidays-try-talking-to-your-relatives-like-an-anthropologist-195637

Her book is Essential Questions.