My Digital Story: Reflection

My digital story is a family history, focusing on my grandfather William Knight (Bill). My mother's maiden name is very important to me because it is my middle name. To create this story, the hardest part was to do the research. I had to sit down with my mother and ask her about my grandfather and about the Knight family history. I had to take notes. I learned a lot from this experience because even though I have heard some stories about her family, we very rarely actually sit down and talk about it together. Some things that I did not know were the dates of when my family moved to America, the dates of my grandparents births, and I did not know the chronology of their lives. I knew nothing about their early life together. My essential question for this project was: Who is my grandfather? The way I changed by doing this project was to learn about him. I learned a lot of my family history that I was partially unaware of before. In the end I developed a stronger feeling of being connected to my grandfather through our belief system. Many of the beliefs that I was raised with were passed down from him through my mother. Now I realize that a lot of the goodness in me come directly from my grandfather. This was a special project for me. It is something that I would like my students to replicate because I think it is important to learn about our ancestry.