Kinship

      I interviewed my mother Kathy Bullock, she was born in South Dakota and then moved to Granada Hills, CA when she was a baby. She has lived in California since. She lived with her parents and brother who she did not get along well with. At 18 she moved out and married her first husband. She has had a total of 4 kids, three boys one girl. Married 3 times. Her rough relationship with her father and the bad relationship between her parents is what she determines was her inability to understand love.

     We just sort of chatted for a bit, it was really easy to get the information but it was odd asking her questions like “so who are your kids” when I obviously knew the answer. But we both laughed it off and would continue on as normal. I think it affected the thoroughness since I probably did not ask as much questions as I should have since I already knew most of the answers since we’ve discussed our family before. I think interviewing someone unrelated would be easier for me since I would not feel quite so silly since I wouldn’t be asking questions about myself and people I know all about.
           
    Some of the things I noticed is that the matrilineal descent tended not to move far, all my siblings and grandparents live in Southern California. However on my patrilineal descent they tended to spread out more. There is more of a trend to smaller families as the generations progress, however there used to be larger families more toward the earlier generations mapped. Ideal differences have put a barrier between my family and my mother’s ex families and her brother and her deceased father.

   

    I know both sides of my family pretty well, my family is fairly small but I know most of my relatives, once we start getting to older generations I know less.
    It all depends I socialize more with my mom’s mom more than I do my dad’s dad, if that makes sense. I also socialize more with my brothers which technically would be considered my mom’s side since they are not related to my father. My aunts and uncles on my dad’s side are more spread out so I don’t see them quite as often.

I think it would have to be my mom,    mostly because she handles the money more often, even though she makes less than my father she does the majority of the spending for the family so often she is the decision maker.   

    Family members who marry into the family are treated the same as members who are apart of the family. We are such a small family that we all get along well and it’s not hard to become apart of our general crazy quirks. 

   I don’t really feel there are any different attitudes based upon gender in our family, I’m the only daughter in the family and I’m not treated any different by my brothers or family. I think we mostly view each other at equals though our family relationship is different than most since my oldest brother is twenty years older than me.

As odd as it may sound I don’t really feel like this exercise I learned much more than I already knew. But looking at it from an anthropological standpoint was interesting, it made me view how my family interacts with each other but for the most part I knew all these thing internally but now I was just viewing them from an external standpoint.