The Importance of Family Stories with Elizabeth Keating, PhD

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Larry (00:07):

You are listening to specifically for Seniors, a podcast designed for a vibrant and diverse senior community. I'm your host, Dr. Larry Barsh. Join me in a lineup of experts as we discuss a wide variety of topics that will empower, inform, entertain, and inspire as we celebrate the richness and wisdom of this incredible stage of life. I'd like to show you something a little different today. Before every podcast, before the formal introduction, I'd like to take a few moments with our guest to introduce ourselves to get to know one another just briefly, because we are after all, strangers before the podcast. Usually it's just a little small talk. But today with our guest, Dr. Elizabeth Keating, that little chat became more interesting. So I'd like to show it to you before we do the formal introduction. I just thought it would be interesting to start trying to get some intergenerational participation in a podcast that is basically for older adults. And if this works,

Elizabeth Keating (01:38):

I think that's, yeah, it's an excellent idea. Yeah, excellent idea.

Larry (01:44):

I, I think if it works out and everything goes fairly smoothly which we always wonder about on any podcast it might be interesting to take subjects like climate control, ai and have someone who has more of, more skin in the game for the future Yeah. Than the older generation.

Elizabeth Keating (02:13):

Yes, there could be a really nice exchange of perspectives and knowledge. I think unfortunately, what I've found is that people in the older generations feel that they're not really consulted much by the younger generations. And I think that perception has emerged from the huge technological changes. So older people are typically not as fearless <laugh> about technology and so, and pro technology. So that tends to set up a perspective on older people that I think it un unfairly discounts their experience. But of course, that has to be shown and not told. But I think an exchange of, of knowledge would be as surprising from, you know, from one direction as from the other.

Larry (03:13):

I just wonder why people in my generations, I'll, I'll put parentheses around me. S take pride in saying I don't know anything about the internet, about technology since we are the generations again. Who invented it?

Elizabeth Keating (03:40):

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I, I don't understand it either. You know, it used to happen in my female students, so it used to be that they, that it was linked with gender identity to be dumb about technology. I'm happy to say that's changed now, but somehow it's linked to other aspects of older people's identity, I think, or maybe it's a bonding mechanism with older other, older folks, but it's unfortunate. Yeah. It, it creates a sense that they've given up or they're not participating as fully. Yeah. And at the university, we had lots of initiatives back 15, 20 years ago. Do you remember the phrase digital divide?

Larry (04:33):

Yeah.

Elizabeth Keating (04:35):

That was about really not about old and young, it was about those who had the money to buy into the technology that you needed to, to be really conversant with internet. And so we had a lot of initiatives bringing that knowledge to other communities. The students were really involved in that. And of course, the, the cell phone revolution really took technology to the masses in a way that the laptop never could have. And so what we ended up with then was a very distributed access to the internet. But the older people, I think unless they have a Facebook interest, they, they tend to think it's not for them somehow.

Larry (05:31):

It's funny you mentioned the female lack of early participation in technology. Now, when I go into an Apple store, <laugh>, I very rarely talk to a male technician or, or salesperson, because the one who really knows the subject

Elizabeth Keating (05:58):

Yeah.

Larry (05:58):

Of the women.

Elizabeth Keating (05:59):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they were really early involved in, in NASA and in computer programming because they were the ones associated with the keyboard.

Larry (06:14):

Oh, that's interesting. I think I was one of the few males in high school who took personal use typing. Yeah. And that has really stood me in great stead <laugh>.

Elizabeth Keating (06:30):

I agree. I took it as a summer school class. We had just moved to California and we had, we didn't have any friends at that point, school hadn't started. So my mother suggested, you know, well take some summer school classes. And I took a typing class, and I swear that has been one of the best classes I ever took.

Larry (06:49):

We had specifically for seniors, thought it was time to try to bridge the generational gap and bring together the wisdom of older adults with the curiosity of younger minds. So we asked Elizabeth Keating, PhD, author of The Essential Questions, interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations to be our guest and for the younger generation. Joining us as our guest host today is my granddaughter, Carmel Bars. Elizabeth Keating is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in culture and communication. Her book, the Essential Questions, reached number one on Amazon's movers and shakers and books in the first week of publication, and was number one in cultural anthropology the week after Elizabeth's academic research and writing focuses on culture and communication and the impacts of technology on communication. She's done field work in several world areas, including Micronesia, Europe, south Asia, and the United States, and has presented talks and papers in 15 countries on a variety of topics in language and culture, and author or co-authored more than 50 publications. Welcome to specifically for seniors, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Keating (08:33):

Oh, it's a real pleasure to be here and to talk with you both today.

Larry (08:38):

Carmel is a recent graduate of Colgate University and currently starting her working life.

Carmel Barsh (08:47):

Yes, those are my accolades, <laugh>. It didn't take quite as long to go through, but that's okay. <Laugh>,

Larry (08:53):

Elizabeth, you are an anthropologist. Let's start by defining what anthropology is and what an anthropologist does.

Elizabeth Keating (09:05):

Anthropology is a really exciting field to be in. It has a rather short history in terms of the social sciences, so it's really not too much more than a hundred years old. Before anthropology, people depended on tourists and other people that came back from far off places, missionaries, and told them what it was like. And then it was realized that we need a, a more formal organized approach. But how to do that, how would you really get knowledge of a people so different from ourselves? And one of the early anthropologists created a methodology we call participant observation. So you went and lived with people and did what they did every day and learned the language from them and learned about their whole worldview and perspective. And that was the key. So you wanted to be able to speak from the perspective of the people you were studying, not the perspective of, in my case, an American.

Elizabeth Keating (10:19):

And that was a really exciting endeavor because it means setting aside your own cultural expectations and assumptions and diving into a world that is really strange and unfamiliar. And what is required for this is a sense that you are adventurous and curious and willing to be mentally flexible enough to imagine a perspective and try to inhabit it that is very different from your own. It can be challenging because some of the moral ideas or the ideas of what makes a moral person can be quite different, but very, very fascinating. Human societies around the world are really fascinating. And nowadays because of the internet, it's so easy for people in these far-flung parts of the world to have their own voice on the internet, which is wonderful, and all people can learn from their perspective. So anthropology has become now a little bit more of a study of not just the different ways of life that people have, but to try to understand in more specific ways what might be distinctive about human groups.

Larry (11:48):

So you bring this perspective to your book, unlike other books that you can find on, on family histories.

Elizabeth Keating (11:59):

That's right. So unfortunately, it wasn't until my mother died and I was going through her things and obviously missing her voice and, and her presence that I realized I didn't know very much about her, and especially her childhood and her adolescence. And when she was young, before she was married, what, what formed her as a person, which of course had an influence on who I became. And I, the funny thing was that I had interviewed her a few years before she died and asked her questions about mainly the family tree as it turned out, relatives that she knew and I didn't. But after she was gone, I really was interested in her. So I did some research to understand what sort of questions could a person ask, and I used my anthropology training to think about the questions an anthropologist would ask when we go to try to understand another way of life, because my mother's way of life was really different from mine in terms of how she grew up.

Elizabeth Keating (13:10):

I think for women especially, many, many things have changed about what it means to grow up as a woman in any society really. There's been so many changes, and it's, it's true for men too. Of course, technology for one thing, has incredibly changed our cultural views and perspectives. And so I interviewed older people from many different countries, and I developed a set of questions based on anthropology that would work to reveal a way of life. And these were questions about the kind of spatial arrangements that societies create. Every society has ways of organizing space, who goes in this space or what do activities take place in this space? And what's the home like, is very, very different across cultures. So I started to ask people things questions to describe the home they grew up in or the house they grew up in. What was it like?

Elizabeth Keating (14:12):

What, what happened in each of those? And, and as it turned out, as they were describing a physical structure, they started to describe the activities and the people that were in there and conversations and things that happened. And I got a distinct sense of their worldview as a child and as an adolescent, what it was like to them to re-inhabit that experience of viewing their childhood house or apartment and the things that occurred to them to speak about. Sometimes they would just go on for a long time telling me different things, and they would say, suddenly I'm way off track. And then I would say, oh, please go on. Because the idea is to try to get details. And if the person is providing lots of details about conversations and people, you don't wanna cut them off. You wanna just continue to hear what they have to say.

Elizabeth Keating (15:15):

And some of the comments that people made, for example, they'd say, oh, I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Or, I am surprised that I can remember to such a degree. And of course, the home is the repository of culture. So it's a great way of getting at people's beliefs back then and what kind of things they did every day. You know, I can't tell you how many times people told me what the beginning of the interview, oh, I just led an ordinary life. You know, nothing about my life is gonna be interesting to you, but it's ordinary life. That's so fascinating. I mean, we love reality TV and, and we love to see what other people's lives are like, and we're just fascinated by our species. It turns out. And actually ordinary life is very, very special. And it's what we miss when it's gone.

Carmel Barsh (16:15):

I mean, that's fascinating. And I was a geography major at Colgate, so like we learn a lot as well about like like spaces and like the home and kind of what sort of like culture is built from the home, like outwards. But I'm just curious, like if you could talk more to the degree to which you feel like these interviews are empowering for the people that you're actually interviewing. Like how, how did you see them like change before versus after the interview? Or like if you were interviewing a group of people, like in a close like community, like how did you see that sort of change after the interviews? Like morale or, or like empowerment, that sort of thing?

Elizabeth Keating (16:56):

Yeah, that's an excellent question because it goes to one of the very deep theoretical aspects of social sciences, and it, it's so interesting that you brought geography into it because cultural geography is so fascinating. But the interview does change both people. And sometimes in research people forget that they, they think that research methods are not implicated in the findings. And, but in this case, of course, when you're trying to find out about your own family, one of the distinct changes that happens is, and this is something that my students reported to me because I, after I was doing all these interviews and being so fascinated by people, I didn't want my students to miss out on this. So I gave my students at the University of Texas, one of the assignments in their culture and communication class was to interview one of their grandparents. And so many of them reported to me.

Elizabeth Keating (18:00):

First of all, it was fascinating because they come from all over the world, and they also came from rural Texas, and we learned so much from them, but they developed a much deeper connection with their grandparents. So some of them said, you know, I've, I've had a, a friendly relationship with my grandparents all my life, but I had no idea what their early lives were like. And then they got to talk about some of the challenges they as university students were facing and what sort of challenges their grandparents faced as young people. And it could be as different as one of my students was studying neuroscience, and her grandmother hadn't even gotten beyond the fourth grade. So that was an interesting conversation for them to have because she started to realize the advantages that she had in the opportunities. And so many of these grandparents that I wish I could have continued my education.

Elizabeth Keating (19:06):

And so it, it changed both people, I think, and in a very positive way. And in terms of the person being interviewed, the grandparents, they loved it because they often just focus on their grandchildren, right? The grandchildren, of course are can't be expected to be curious at a young age about their grandparents' early years. But then it, the, the conversation is always structured on roles, grandparent, grandchild. And what these conversations do is your grandparent who's sitting there, you know, with their gray hair and maybe their mobility issues, and they look quite frail, and you find out the adventures they had <laugh> when they were young, and it allows you to see them in a much different way. I remember one student told me that she'd always seen her grandparent as a rather cautious person. Her grandmother always seemed very cautious. And then she found out by doing the interview that her grandmother was one of five daughters and the only daughter that learned how to read.

Elizabeth Keating (20:17):

And this was because this was in a, a South Asia culture. And this was because that granddaughter had made up her mind that she was gonna learn to read or that grandmother when she was a small child. And so suddenly my student had a very different idea about the her grandmother's risk-taking capabilities and, and, and who she was. So it can really change relationships. As a professional anthropologist, when you go to the field, you certainly do change the people you're studying with, although in ways that are sometimes not that predictable, I think that I ended up reinforcing some of the, their ideas about outsiders on the small Micronesian island that I studied. They, they thought we were just as peculiar as <laugh> as we might have thought them. And they were particularly shocked by a couple of American practices. And one is homelessness that shocked them because they would couldn't conceive of ACI society where there was homelessness.

Elizabeth Keating (21:31):

And the other aspect of American culture that they found very troubling and strange was that we put our infants in a separate bedroom to go to sleep, and they couldn't imagine not having the infant next to the mother <laugh>. So so it's, it, I mean, it does change people's view of the other, but of course, we're all judging each other in these encounters. And they were, the people that I always studied were very hospitable and warm and willing to exchange ideas. And we all grew from the exchange of ideas. Certainly it, people are often saying that from learning about another way of life, you learn more about your own way of life yourself. It's like when you learn a new language, you know, you're not conscious of English grammar until suddenly grammar becomes something else. And something more interesting.

Larry (22:37):

You mentioned that anthropology was a relatively young science, and I took anthropology in college in the late fifties. There is a distinct difference between your approach and what I remember from from my own experience in an anthropology course.

Elizabeth Keating (23:02):

Yes, it's changing, of course. I think a lot of university subjects are changing as we become more global in our perspectives. And also as there emerges a critique of western science, in other words, the idea that we cherish in the west of documenting all kinds of things in the world, <laugh> describing them, writing books about them is not really the way to knowledge in other parts of the world. And I think a recognition of that has been a good tonic, if you will, to the social sciences to be able to encompass more different ways of knowing.

Carmel Barsh (23:59):

Yeah. I, I would like, do you think you could speak more towards, because I took one anthropology course in school and we talked a lot about like, like what you were saying, critiques of the practice and how it can sort of be viewed in a negative way of like, somebody from like western quote unquote culture, kind of like culture inserting themself maybe in this society and like just being like, oh, we're gonna pick out these bits and pieces and kind of like use it to our advantage, which I know isn't what it is. But how do you sort of like approach that sort of study in like the most ethical way?

Elizabeth Keating (24:38):

Yes, of course. That's the, the big challenge. And there are groups of people in the world who feel that their knowledge shouldn't be shared. You know, in the West we have, if you think of Wikipedia for example, Wikipedia is about people collaborating and sharing knowledge in a quite incredible way. And in many parts of the world that would be inconceivable because knowledge is a form of of life itself and of power and of, and it's an inheritance that you're not supposed to just freely squander in their terms. You're supposed to keep it more close and more guarded. And in fact, in the island in Micronesia, where I first did anthropology for my PhD, they had the idea that knowledge was connected with your life force. And so if you gave away knowledge, then you were diminishing your life force. And there was the idea that knowledge was something that contributed to your health and wellbeing.

Elizabeth Keating (25:56):

And so that was a very different approach. And so I didn't get anywhere with interviewing <laugh> people there. Fortunately, I was studying a feature of their language. I'm a linguistic anthropologist where they did some very, very I would say complex status marking and hierarchy building through language. And I was very interested in how they use those language features. And fortunately it turned out that they were very proud of this special language that they had and that it made sense to them that I would be studying that. And of course, language just falls out of people's mouths. They, and that was easy to collect. And I did a lot of videotaping, and they thought videotaping was also extremely sensible, because whenever I asked about anything, how do you catch these mangrove, crop crabs, you know, how do you even see them? They would always say things like, just watch. So watching was the way to learn. And so videotaping made a lot of sense. And so, you know, a lot of anthropology is un is working with the people that were studying. And later on I did projects with engineers in India and Romania and Brazil. And of course that was a very different type of anthropology. I wasn't describing their way of life, I was describing how they communicated with other engineers across the world and how their culture impacted their collaborative strategies.

Larry (27:41):

It's interesting that you mentioned that their knowledge was something to be retained and not given away, as opposed to cultures in which the video image itself Yeah. Would've been the thing to be retained.

Elizabeth Keating (28:06):

That's a very good point. So we all have our, our, our pressure points really about what's private and what's public. I know my friends in the Netherlands I was fortunate to have a postdoctoral fellowship in the Netherlands after I got my PhD. And my friends in the Netherlands told me that if they moved to a different house, even in the same town, they had a very small window of time to notify the authorities of their new address. And coming from my American sensibility, I thought, well, you know, lots of people in America have different addresses or, or are careful who they give their address out to. And but they were shocked that people in America would put their mailbox on the street. So you'd, your mail just went, your private mail just went in this unlocked mailbox at the end of your drive <laugh>. And to them that was making themselves way too vulnerable. You had to have a locked mailbox or a slot in your front door where it was pushed through. So there are always things that you don't imagine are going to seem very the whole landscape is organized differently and a cultural geography or a geographer would really have a good perspective on this. You know, how how is the landscape shaped? And that's, you can use that sort of as a metaphor for other practices too,

Larry (29:44):

Not to mention sharing your entire life on Facebook.

Elizabeth Keating (29:48):

<Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>, that's changed a lot too, hasn't it?

Larry (29:53):

Yeah, I, I, I sort of wish as someone who gets concerned about security in older adults that we wouldn't share quite so much publicly. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, you you mentioned private versus public as well. As we respond to the younger generation's questions in, in trying to get our stories, how much do we keep private and how much do we share publicly?

Elizabeth Keating (30:33):

Yes. The questions that I've designed are really questions about describing a way of life. In other words, describing the space, describing time, what was time like, how was time organized? People always think time is the one universal, but it's not, cultures have very different ideas about time and beliefs, not the religious beliefs necessarily, but how have their beliefs perhaps changed over time? What kinds of kinship systems were in place and what were the marriage practices, courtship practices? Those are really fun <laugh>. But so there's, it's possible that they don't have to get too personal. Of course, the personal aspect of description, everyone has a, has a unique perspective, tells you something about them, but they don't have to reveal things that they don't want to reveal. On the other hand, they are talking to their own relatives, their, their grandchildren or their children. And sometimes this becomes a time where they can find a way to talk about things that they haven't talked about before.

Elizabeth Keating (31:49):

But the, this is really to, to get a description of a way of life rather than to reveal secrets or to talk about difficult times. There are always questions that will seem difficult. My father never wanted to talk about World War ii, for example, like many war veterans didn't wanna talk about it, and that's perfectly fine. There are just so many o other things that you can talk about. There won't even be time for them. I have had some of my students report that their grandparents told them about members of the family before them that had owned slaves. And how that was an interesting moment for the two generations to discuss their feelings about this, because it wasn't that their grandparents were proud of this, they weren't, they were embarrassed by it. And they, and yet when they're trying to make sense of it, they, there are things they can discuss that are common to all human groups.

Elizabeth Keating (33:04):

In other words, the distribution of resources and equality, inequality and so forth. It's, it's always an opportunity to link all the human challenges that every generation faces. But, but certainly to answer your question there, I think each person who's doing an interview has to respect people's desires not to go into things. And it's in the book the Essential Questions, I talk about the importance of letting the interviewee take control of their narrative. And so it's important not to interrupt them and not to influence what's being said by taking a very minimal role in, as a conversationalist is, is part of what I advise is to be very to, to give signals that you're appreciating what they have to say, but not judging it and, and not making comments. Because some, one of the reasons that sometimes these interviews are one of the reasons that to pay attention to that is that you wanna generate trust in an interview.

Elizabeth Keating (34:32):

And if your parent or grandparent that you're interviewing feels they're being judged by you <laugh> that's certainly going to lead to them not being, perhaps not giving as full descriptions as they could. And, and of course, nobody wants to be judged <laugh>, and we all have a sense of how our audience is viewing what we say, but the, the objective in this kind of an interview is really to find out about a way of life and to take an anthropologist perspective, which is not to judge and not, and to try to understand that way of life from their perspective. And one example I give in the book is, let's say the grandchild was brought up to question authority, not so hard to imagine <laugh> and and, but let's say the grandparent was raised to to never talk back and to do what they were told.

Elizabeth Keating (35:38):

So you've got some very different moral stances there about the individual's responsibility. And yet it can be a point of, let's say the, the grandchild who's being the interviewer can try to imagine what that might be like to grow up in that world. And once you get into that space of inhabiting that world, you can have a more compassion for your grandparent that who might have a harder time with resisting certain ideas or resisting or, or embracing change. So you, it it helps you to, to grow compassion through the, the strategy of taking the other person's point of view.

Carmel Barsh (36:26):

I'm curious, like if, like, so if, just to be clear, have you interviewed your own family using these sets of questions?

Elizabeth Keating (36:35):

You know, my family was all gone by the time I wanted to do this, and that's why I developed the research project and became curious because I, I had asked the wrong questions. And so, and then when I started interviewing people of grandparent age and found out how rich their answers were, then I gave the assignment to my students because I didn't want them to have my experience of missing out. And their experience was wonderful. And one of my students said it was the best assignment they had in their whole university career <laugh>, which I, I think was an indication of how life changing it was for them and how enriching. And they were also able to link what we were talking about in class about culture with their own family, which I think instead of, you know, a group on an island in the Pacific or engineers who who might have seemed in a different world. Anyway.

Carmel Barsh (37:41):

So for somebody who does choose to engage in one of these interviews with their parents, with their grandparents, what is your advice in terms of taking what they say and sort of like processing it into something that you can, I guess, like implement in your own life or just like what, what is your suggestion or what do you tell your students for like post interview sort of like analysis or processing of the information?

Elizabeth Keating (38:08):

Well, it's only the beginning. In other words, a lot of them have reported to me that they, they still continue to have interesting conversations with their grandparents because this initial understanding their grandparent better and understanding their point of view and how they were socialized into that point of view at a young age, that has opened the door for a lot more conversations. And I think that many of them have, maybe you wouldn't call it really profound insights afterwards, but those that have lost their heritage language. And in, in those cases, they might have their mother sit in, in the interview with the grandparent and help to, to be a bridge and a translation, then they realize they've lost something by losing their heritage language and they make a commitment to, to regain those that expertise. And then others have recognized some of the enduring aspects of the challenges of growing up and the challenges of making your way in the world and the challenges of choosing a, a partner.

Elizabeth Keating (39:22):

So the, the question about courtship practices sometimes reveals that the grandparents had a much more active <laugh> dating life than they ever expected. 'cause They always saw them with grandpa or they, they're pretty conscious of their later relationships. But that's interesting too because I think they, they then feel, well, it's not just me or it's not just my generation, but these kinds of challenges of this huge decision which affects your whole life, which comes often comes at an age when you really don't recognize a lot of what that relationship is gonna mean over time. And you don't have very much to go on often. And so I think they recognize that they're, they're not alone, really, that other generations have figured it out and they have <laugh>, they've had successful lives in spite of amazing challenges that some of these grandparents have had. It's and that's, that's a takeaway, if you will, that the, the grandparents are thriving and happy, and yet they have had some very, very tough times.

Larry (40:45):

Let's not lose sight of the fact that I want to hear more about your actual book. Can you walk us through the book a bit?

Elizabeth Keating (40:59):

Yes. The book begins with my story of having realized too late that I didn't understand my mother in the way I wish I did now and be able to have more compassion for her when we had our struggles about the symbolic meaning of dress <laugh>. You know, there is one chapter in the book about dress and adornment and the human body is, has always been a canvas for artistic expression. And yet what those expressions mean changes over time. So what does it mean to have a long skirt or a short skirt or show a bare midriff or not show it? That changes over time, but often people are stuck in the interpretive framework. They learned early on when they were growing up, and it's very hard for them to shift. So my mother and I, like many <laugh>, many mothers and daughters had a lot of conflict about clothing and what it meant and other, other kinds of activities too.

Elizabeth Keating (42:13):

And I think I would've had more compassion for her and for her point of view and how difficult it was for me to, I mean, I shouldn't have expected her to be able to adopt my perspective as I did. If I'd understood a little bit more of her upbringing, the parenting styles, what school was like, things like that, I would, I would've had more compassion. And so I talk in the first part of the book a little bit about my own story, and then I talk about tips on interviewing. So interviewing is a very interesting skill. It's, see, can seem like having a conversation, but actually you have to be very careful about the different roles that you inhabit. So you have to inhabit the role of the conversation of a, of a conversationalist, but also you have to manage the conversation because you wanna talk about certain topics.

Elizabeth Keating (43:14):

And then you have to be not a very big participant, which usually in a conversation it's sort of 50 50 hopefully, or, you know, some sort of variation on that. But in this case, you want them to do all the talking. So another thing I talk about in the interviewing chapter is the importance of silence. I learned this early on as an anthropologist when I listened to the tapes of activities and conversations that I'd had. I could see that I had interrupted someone's train of thought and I wish I hadn't, because then I'm too much in control of the narrative instead of them. And you really want to be sure to be able to be silent. So if no conversation is going on, you don't wanna jump in because it's taking them time to recollect and to change those images into language that they can then communicate the image to you.

Elizabeth Keating (44:18):

So that takes time and you wanna be respectful of that. So I tell people they really need to be able to, to hold a seven second silence, which for Americans particularly, is a long, long time because we tend to jump in to cover, we think it's awkward or something's going wrong. So that's a critical task in interviewing, is to be able to manage that and also manage to be affirming of them without judging them. And that's very easy to do, to just do a lot of head nodding and appreciating, but not just giving them a, a sense one way or the other that you're judging them so that you can build trust in the account the way they wanna tell it. And then later in the book, the, the subsequent chapters, take each of the questions and provide questions and follow up questions, but also tell about the background behind each question, the reason that space is important in a person's life. The reason that time asking about time gives you a sense of what a daily routine might be like, and asking about kinship and marriage practices, asking about beliefs, asking about fears they might have had and other questions that would round out a way of life and give you some insights into a culture that's now vanished really.

Larry (45:59):

Did we miss anything?

Elizabeth Keating (46:02):

I think the last point that you made that people really need to get started is a really important point. And the treasures that are in our family are immense. And we sometimes think that the grandparent in front of us is frail and conservative <laugh>, and yet we have no idea of the wonderful life that they've had and especially their childhoods and, and young adult years, because I think those are always filled with if adventuring in the world one way or the other. Even if you're in your own small town and that's where you wanna be, you're becoming independent and you are encountering the world as an independent person.

Larry (46:59):

What's more of the title of the book is The Essential Questions. Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations. Elizabeth, you have a website with more information on the book and you and your other books. What's the URL again of your website?

Elizabeth Keating (47:19):

It's elizabeth keating.com

Larry (47:27):

And the book is available where

Elizabeth Keating (47:30):

It's available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble and at other bookstores.

Larry (47:38):

Elizabeth, this was a fascinating discussion. You opened up thoughts on anthropology and family that I had not thought of. Carmel. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Carmel Barsh (47:59):

Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun. And thank you Elizabeth. I I really enjoyed the conversation.

Elizabeth Keating (48:04):

I really enjoyed it too, and I loved beating you and hearing both of your perspectives

Carmel Barsh (48:10):

As well. Yeah, likewise.

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