In Dr.Soldani’s history 2020 course we
have done three research assignments that were all very time consuming as well
as an informative assignment. We were
instructed to do two casefiles and them a peer review on these casefiles.
Basically, casefiles are cases that we are given to choose in class and very
from slaves, prisoners, etc. When I did my research, it was about women
criminals in the 1950s. Seemed to be very interesting but the amount of time it
took to find the information on those ladies was very excessive. It was a great
assignment and Dr.Soldni provided us two great sources which were ancestry.com
and newspaper.com. I don’t know how well it would have gone without the help of
those sources. With this project came a lot of time going into it because
they're so my people in this world that when we are looking up these people
numerous amounts of people have the same name. What I had to do for these
projects were find out who these criminals were (in my case). With these
women's cases being from the 1950s there wasn’t a lot of information in these
cases about these women. Also, the hand writing was a little hard to figure
out. But there is a lot of work and putting the pieces into the puzzle that
comes along with it. Majority of the projects were fun, but all-in all-time
consuming.
In the researches we had the chance to do
one on criminals, another on family and the last on our classmate's casefiles.
In my perspective I learned lot from the casefiles especially the last one I
did on my family tree. I was able to back track on my family which was honestly
cool. Some things I was able to find out is some things about my
great-grandfather. His name that was given to me is Robert Herman Kleaver. But
his real name is Herman Kleaver. His mom gave him that name at birth and he did
not like his name so made it to Robert. He was drafted in too the army for
world war two and there were pictures that I saw of his paper work like actual
documents. It was cool, and I never thought to investigate. When doing this
family tree, I also discovered some of my family members have been living near
me and I never knew it. This research project has been informative to me
because I have gotten the chance to get some insight on my family that I do not
know much about. The casefiles I had to research on about the criminals was
just as interesting because we got too see actual criminals and their crimes.
In one of the casefiles I discovered the criminal had the word chink as a word
to describe her, but it is slang for Chinese and it can be offensive of course.
The last project was the peer review when we were able to read our classmates
projects and grade them. Also, we were instructed to do our own research and
see if we could find something on our peers' person/ persons that they couldn’t
find which was interesting reading through. Honestly this was the hardest part,
because it was hard to really conduct research on people that didn’t have
background information but was telling a story of them.
Well technology is still up and coming but
advanced research is needed. This class has taught me a bunch of things that
maybe I wouldn’t have been able to see without the hard work. When I look back
on my research I definitely see the time and effort put into it and although it
wasn’t perfect I tried. We could use the power of technology to learn and
expand our knowledge. I am so happy for the chance o see history about my
family. It was definitely my favorite part.
