Kiley
Welcome & Thanks For VisitinG!
I’m Kiley Liddell, a freshman at Darien High School whose IDEA project-in-progress can be found here! I have an identical twin sister (whose page can also be found on this site) and a little sister in fifth grade. I play lacrosse and field hockey and also enjoy running, swimming, playing the clarinet, going to the beach, and skiing in my free time. Also, I have been acting professionally since I was a baby and have been featured in several TV shows and movies. I have always been interested in my family roots, but have never had or thought I would have time to learn more about them, given my busy schedule involving sports, acting, and school. However, I realized this class was the perfect opportunity to carve out time to delve into my family history, so, here I am!
I plan to achieve an understanding of how all the branches of my family have ended up where they are now, in the United States. I will hold interviews with living relatives, research online, seek out family artifacts, and sift through family archives and papers in order to put together the migration of my family over time that led to… (drumroll please) me! I will then compile media from these endeavors into a documentary telling the story of my lineage through meaningful stories, which will ultimately showcase my work.
Final Reflection
Overall, I am very pleased with my choice of project and how it was executed. Since I chose a project quite literally related to my family and me, I felt very connected to it and enjoyed the substantial time I had to spend working on it over the course of the year. Truly enjoying your subject matter would be the most significant piece of advice I could give to any incoming students, since they will produce a much higher quantity and quality of work when they do not have to force themselves to spend time on their project. However, I did learn to adhere to deadlines through proper time management, which I had never experienced on such a grand scale before. I anticipate having to handle similar situations further along in my academic career, which is why I am very glad I gave myself the opportunity to practice this process in a relatively consequence-free environment with this pass/fail class. Although I initially planned to create a documentary about my genealogy, I am glad I opted out of that and decided to focus on simply researching and presenting that information at Achiever’s Night because instead of spending an unnecessary amount of time on video editing, I was able to focus on what mattered: my family’s stories.
Me with my trifold from Achievers' Night.
Fifth Mini Goal
Fourth Mini Goal
My fourth set of mini goals was to finish my research on the geneology of the Liddell family name, especially clarifying the details of my Liddell ancestors' immigration to the United States, before starting work on my family timeline from Scotland in the 18th century to present day.
Third Mini Goal
INITIAL GOAL
For my third mini-goal, I intend to formally meet with my great aunt & maternal & paternal grandparents. I will collect video footage of interviews with them and organize photos and media to accompany what they talk about. I will discover as many family artifacts and heirlooms as I can when I visit my maternal grandparents over Christmas break and at my grandparents’ house in New Canaan. As I just decided to change the end goal of my project to a series of short videos from one long documentary, one possibility during this mini-goal period is that I will draft one of those short videos about an interesting topic I come across. This all depends on the content I come across and the amount of content I decide will be necessary to complete one video.
second mini goal
INITIAL GOAL
For my second mini-goal, I intend to accomplish a few things that will seriously kickstart my project. I will contact my grandparents and others of their generation in my family in order to ask them questions and set up interviews with them about our family. I will then meet with whomever is able to do so in this upcoming three-week period, or else plan to do so later with others, in order to discuss their memories of deceased relatives, any stories that may have been told to them by and/or about family, and to inquire about any familial artifacts they may have that I could look at.
REFLECTION
In my second mini-goal period, I reached out to my extended family members to ask if they were interested in helping with my project. Especially interested in possible interviews to collect content for my videos, I planned to meet with my maternal grandparents, paternal grandparents, and great aunt. I planned out meeting with them in person over the course of the holiday season, based on our travel schedules to see each other. A valuable skill I learned in this mini-goal was professionally reaching out to others and collaborating to figure out schedules and meetings.
first mini goal
In my first mini-goal period, I decided to start my project by creating a digital family tree from online research. Even though detailed trees already exist online, I wanted to take the time to familiarize myself with my lineage before contacting older relatives and delving deep into my project. After doing this, however, I realized that the family tree I was making was far less detailed than the extensive and interactive ones found online, understanding that I could spend another month on this family tree, or just use the better, already made one. My decision was obvious. I decided to stop making my digital family tree right at the end of my first mini-goal period, so that is what I accomplished.