1 - Photograph three generations

You can choose this task if you find a family for which you have access to grandparents, parents and children, or at least to their photographs. The idea is to scan three pictures and place them side by side, each one representing one generation. What countries did each generation live in? What insights can you get by comparing the photographs? Here are two examples of how to choose your set of photographs:

• A new photograph of a girl, and photographs of her mother and grandmother when they were her age.
• Three photographs that you take, each one of one or more members of each generation.

2 - Conduct a mini-interview

Doing an interview is sometimes more difficult than it seems. To make it even more challenging, we are asking you to capture the results in a short paragraph or two. Her are the types of questions you can try to answer by interviewing family members:

• What led them to come to this country?
• What was different about this country compared to what they had expected to find?
• Have they been back to visit the old country since they moved, or do they plan to do so? Why or why not?

3 - Document the new neighborhood

Often the urban environment people live in when they migrate is very different from the one they left behind, or from what they expected to find. Can you capture some aspects of their new neighborhood as the starting point of a comparison with the old neighborhood? Through very short, objective descriptions, one or two photographs and maybe even a fragment of a map, you can capture some aspects of the environment in which the family or person lives. What does the building they live in look like, where do they shop, what kind of people are their neighbors?

4 - Write a one-paragraph family history

Did you find a family which has an eventful and mobile past? Have its different generations been to many countries and witnessed some of the forces that lead to migration? If so, you can try to write a short paragraph which systematically records the main facts of their migration history up to the present: in what places did the different generations live? Why did they leave? Where did other family members end up? How did they get to where they are now?

5 - Find a special belonging

What kinds of things did the family bring with it when it moved to your country? Is there some object among their belongings which is a special reminder of the old country? What is its significance? Document and describe the object and explain any special meaning, feelings or memories that are associated with it. You can write a description, take a picture, record a family member talking about it…

6 - Record a voice or a song

Do the way some family members talk reveal where they came from? What are some words they use that are different from the ones you would use? Or do they know a song from the old country that they are willing to sing for you? Record a short segment of words, speech or song which gives some insights about this family's migration.

7 - Make a map of the journey

Can you draw the lines of the migration of a family on a map? In what places did each generation and family member live? What route did they take to get to each place? When did the migrations occur? Where did other family members go? All this can be captured using diagrams and maps. Produce a graphic representation of the migration of a family that ended up in your country.