Discussion 6: Your Kinship Diagram

1. Draw a kinship diagram of your family. Start with ego (you) towards the bottom-center of your paper. Go as far back as you can (you might have to call your parents or grandparents to get some of this information to fill in your kinship diagram). Include at least three generations. Make sure to label your kinship chart with ego and kindred. Upload an image of your chart on the Discussion board. Make sure to upload the image so it appears along with your text.
   1. (Alternatively, if you don’t want to make a kinship diagram of your own family, choose another family. For example, the Kardashians, the family in Voyages, your neighbors, etc. Draw the kinship diagram and answer the questions based on that family/diagram).
   2. Please email me if you need help. Families are complicated!
2. Write an analysis of your kinship diagram. Write a title that is descriptive of the theme of your post or your question to set you apart from other students. Make this the first line in you post. Use at least six terms from the glossary terms of chapters 10 and 11 in your analysis. (Highlight the glossary terms that you use in bold).
   1. Make sure to discuss the structure of your family and their residency patterns.
   2. Then think about what is interesting to you after making your kinship diagram. You could discuss who you consider to be part of your kindred and why, and how this is similar to or different from the typical American kindred discussed in the book. Have things like migration, economic recession or marriage impacted your kinship chart or family practices and in what ways? Were you surprised by how few/many generations you actually knew?
   3. Is there something in your family that is difficult to draw using these symbols? Did you have to invent your own symbols for some of them? What do you think this says about kinship charts? Are they reflections of reality or interpretations?
3. Ask a discussion question related to kinship, marriage and family or the class’s kinship charts.
4. Respond to two other students’ posts. It would be interesting to compare various kinship charts and think about what makes them different.