31 December 2024

14 December 2024

A Holiday Project: Essential Questions

The holidays are upon us, for those who will be spending time with family this season, consider asking them some not so run-of-the-mill questions. 

Professor of anthropology, Elizabeth Keating, wrote a book entitled Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations. The Atlantic ran an article by her about it when the book was published. This is a gift link to read the article for free: “The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families But Should.” 

In her book, Keating presents groups of questions that tap into memories and experiences that can reveal more than you ever thought to ask your family members...or yourself for that matter. These are not the birth-marriage-death, names-dates-places, work-life-faith kind of questions. As an anthropologist, Keating brings an interesting perspective to interviewing our elders about their lives. 

Each section starts with a broad question and has several follow up questions that explore the nooks and crannies of a life. The topics include questions about:


...background (is there a story about your name?)
...space (tell me about the house you grew up in)
...time (tell me about a typical summer day when you were a child)
...social interactions (tell me about a time that you were treated as insignificant)
...becoming (tell me about what the world looked like as you entered it as an adult)
...identity (what did people tease you about when you were a child or a teenager)
...body & adornment (tell me about the clothes you wore as a child)
...belief (how have your beliefs changed in your lifetime?)
...kinship & marriage (what do you wish you asked your parents or grandparents?)
...material culture (what objects from childhood do you still have and why?)
...fear (what has been your bravest act?)
...memory (what songs trigger memories for you?
...and my favorite, what do you wish people knew about you?

If you are not spending time with your elders this holiday, or you are the elder, or you just want to spend some time being introspective without the help of the ghosts of Christmas, Past, Present and Future, head to the library or purchase this book. Then grab a new notebook, a pencil, a cup of coffee and start answering these essential questions. 

# # #

05 December 2024

"De-rehabilitation" of Rehabilitated Soviet Repressions

Many of our German ancestors were among those who were victims of Soviet repression and who were “rehabilitated”—exonerated of their supposed crimes—as the Soviet Union fell and in the years following. Most of the crimes were related to being ethnically German. Some of these rehabilitations occurred after a sentence was served, or decades later, often posthumously.

There are collections of names in both in online memory books of the repressed and paper-published books. AHSGR has one for Kazakhstan specifically that is very good. But deportations of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union to labor camps and special settlements were all over the northern regions of the European part of RSFSR, east into the western part of Siberia, as well as the SSRs in Central Asia. These collections include the person’s name, father’s name, place and year of birth, arrest date, sentencing date, the sentence, where they were deported, and the rehabilitation date.

Because I’ve been working with the Black Sea Germans on these lists lately and mapping the locations, this just published article in The Atlantic caught my eye. Russian president Vladimir Putin has decided “de-rehabilitate” and reinstate the original charges. 

Seriously? 3.5 million defendants, mostly deceased, in a collapsed regime for the purpose of nostalgic glory of Stalin’s terror?

Wanting to be civil, I looked up a nicer way to say what I wanted to say: 


Unsatisfied with the softer alternatives, I will stick with my original thought: that was a dick move

In the end, does it even matter? No, probably not. It’s one man spinning out in his final years on Earth and creating busy work for those around him and to what end. What I don’t know how it might affect the descendants of the repressed who still live in Russia. There is no reason not to think that the descendants would be further punished for the crimes of the their ancestors. Ridiculous. Yes. Also “not very thoughtful,” a “poor choice,” “not very kind,” “not very fair,” and “could be handled differently.”

# # #