Genealogy is the study of family. This includes research that involves digging through archives, both digital and paper. It also involves the collection of family stories. Often, those stories tell more about a person’s family tree than the vital records will. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have videos that are vastly different from each other. Each one speaks volumes.
Technology is a wonderful thing. Genealogists can now take videos of their family, and send it to relatives that live across the country or around the world. You can take old family photos and create slide shows from them. Genealogists today can take out their iPhone at a family reunion and use it to record a video of a relative as she shares stories from when she was a child, or when her kids were small. This makes it really easy to record important pieces of your family history.
People are also using the same types of technology to create videos that are designed to influence people to vote for a particular politician. Two of the candidates that are hoping to be elected President of the United States this year in the upcoming 2012 election have videos that share stories about their immediate family.
Mitt Romney has a video that is designed to give viewers a warm, fuzzy, and possibly nostalgic, feeling. The sounds of an acoustic guitar play as photos that were taken of his children, when they were little, appear on the screen.
In between these images are pieces of an interview with his wife, Ann Romney. Mitt Romney appears in a few of the photos that flash by. He was not interviewed, though. He is only passively involved in this video. Ann Romney shares fond memories of waiting at home with their six children for Mitt to come home after work. She talks about how excited the children got when their father came home. It is clear that she really enjoyed being a stay at home mother who watched the children while her husband was working.
Barack Obama has a video that shows a portion of a speech that he was giving. You can see him standing behind a podium, with a crowd of women behind him. I do not know where this speech was given, or who the women behind him are.
There are no family photos in this video. It is not accompanied by music. Instead, the camera focuses on Obama as he shares a few stories about his family life. He notes that he was gone a lot because he was teaching, or practicing law, or working in a government position. He states that this put a large burden on his wife, who had to care for their two children while she simultaneously held down a job. He says that they didn’t have the luxury of being able to afford for her to not work.
Obama gets somewhat emotional while talking about his family, but not to the point where it disturbs the flow of his speech. He notes that his wife, Michele, often felt guilty for not spending enough time with her girls when she was working, and also for not spending enough time at work when she was caring for her children. The President notes that they wished there was a machine that would have allowed them to be in two places at one time.
Image by mpclemens on Flickr