It stated in the reading for this week that a database can be thought as a set of relations. This automatically made me think of how a database could be applied to a set of relationships, which made me think of my large Italian family and how we could be broken up for storage in a database; although, in a way, we already have been. One of my grandmother’s sisters created a book in the past decade or so that documents the up-to-date history of the Gagliardini family, beginning from the days of poverty in Cupramontana, covering the years of migration, from Italy to Ellis Island to Madera, California, and eventually, even mentioning all the great-great-grandchildren, like myself. The original reason for the creation of this “database,” much like others, is for the storage and retrieval of information about my family. Essentially, it has helped family members keep track of each other as well as appreciate the difficult journey our family went through for us to be here right now; in addition, it also has acted as a treasure chest for all the stories told throughout the years, and many photographs as well. For practical reasons, all the “data” has been designed and split up into categories and specific order; family history comes first, starting chronologically, but also focusing on certain aspects, such as food. There is another section that purely focuses on family records. There are documents for each family, starting with my great-great-grandparents’ family, then a page for each of their children’s family, then so on, and so forth. These documents have actually helped me very much to put a name to certain faces that I might have seen at a family reunion, although could not keep track of. There is also detailed information, like date of birth, which helps the family keep track of birthdays easily. Although this book is not digitized like most databases, it still acts as a database in the way it stores information; and although there is no form of searching like in digitized databases, the table of contents aids in the search, but the way it is split up also allows easy retrieval of information.
“Gargliardini Family Reunion ’14”