I hope that I'm doing this right...

There are several folk groups that I think I belong to, the two categories that they fall into being territorial folk groups and social folk groups. My social folk groups include my family and friends. Within my family there's my Mother's side and my Father's side of the family. Both sides have their own unique set of stories and jokes which have become a part of my concept of our family. My Father, Mother, Sister and I all have a common history and there are things that we share that make us a folk group.

My friends are another folk group with the sub-categories of college friends and high school friends. My college friends and high school friends are distinctly different groups, with a different set of histories and common experiences. Different things are of varying importance to the different groups, for instance, basketball is more important to my college friends while football is more important to my high school friends.

The territorial folk groups that I consider myself a part of are Virginian, Ohioan, New Englander, Californian, and Irish. My Mother's side of the family is from Ohio, my father's side from New England. I was born and raised in Virginia but I consider myself a little Californian because we spent about a year of my life in California on trips with my Father because he had a job that was based out there. Most of my relatives are Irish, with the exception of a German grandfather and a little French and English mixed in there. The first four locations are of more recent importance to my family and me, the ancestral folk group is still important to me because there are Irish traditions that I have learned, but they are somewhat less important when compared with the first set of locations.

The different places that I consider myself tied to affect me in different ways. I think that the most obvious way in which these places affect me is my manner of speaking. I notice that when I'm around different members of my family I speak differently depending on where we are. For instance, when I'm in Loudoun County, I speak differently than I do when I'm visiting my cousins up in Ohio and use different colloquialisms.