More than a photo: Germans from Russia remember their familial relationships

Most narrators of the Dakota Memories Oral History Project (DMOHP), the children and grandchildren of ethnic German immigrants from Russia, reminisce a great deal about their family relationships -- grandparent-grandchild relationships, parent-child relationships, and sibling-sibling relationships. They share memories of their grandmothers baking them delicious dough dishes, of their fathers making them labor endlessly in the fields, and of their siblings coaxing them into mischief. Through these relationships, Germans from Russia not only learned about their ethnic group's identity, but they also reshaped it into a new identity, blending their past with their present. Within the context of family relationships, these German Russian descendants forged a new identity rooted in their ethnic heritage and history, but serviceable to new, American-born generations.