Do you have a compiled genealogy book with numbers assigned to each individual? What do those numbers mean and how can you trace your family with them? If you have wondered how to navigate the long blocks of numbered text in these books, you’re not alone. Last September, my friend Gina and I were chatting about family history when she showed me a genealogy book compiled by one of her husband’s relatives. She let me borrow it. As I flipped through it, I realized how daunting...
Do you have a family heirloom sitting around gathering dust? Curious about the ancestor who owned it? Are you trying to find some ways to interest your teen in family history? Introduce them to this month’s Instagram challenge at makefamilyhistory.org and watch the magic begin. Teens love social media. Combine that with a fascinating family heirloom and you’ve got them hooked. I don’t have any teens left at home, but I am helping a...
Today, we have a guest post by one of our readers, Lindsey Crouch. Lindsey found our post about teaching youth to use census records, then adapted it for a younger age group. She’s here to share her documents and lesson plan so anyone can recreate the activity to teach children about census records. Enjoy! -Nicole —- Hi, I’m Lindsey I’m originally from Idaho and graduated from Utah State in social work. I’m a life-long learner and a mom...
According to D. Joshua Taylor at the Green Valley (AZ) Genealogical Society seminar yesterday, the stereotypical genealogist is a 65 year old white female. He learned this when he dedicated a separate web browser for his genealogy google searches only. Google built a profile based on these searches to target him for advertisements. He found out from friends at google that google thought he was a 65 year old white female. We got a...
Need a way to share family stories with your kids more often? How about coloring pages? Every so often, we create a coloring page about one of our grandparents. While my son was coloring one of his Great Grandpa Elder today, he remembered that Great Grandpa passed away last year. He talked about missing him and wondered what he looked like when he was younger. As he thought about it, he colored this picture of Grandpa in the army. We...
After Christmas, my 5 year old was devastated to take down the tree, lights, and ornaments. So we quickly replaced the Christmas tree with our Valentine’s Day decorations! A couple years ago I started decorating for Valentine’s Day with old (and new) family photos of weddings. These are some of my favorite wedding photos from our family: Here’s how I decorated last year: And this is what I came up with this year: I framed a pretty...
I’ve been searching for a way to easily illustrate a book for kids about their ancestors. I would love to have several ancestor story books that I can read to my children at Family Home Evening, bedtime, and anytime they have questions about their ancestors. It would be great to use actual photographs, but what if you don’t have any? Here’s one solution: www.storyboardthat.com! It’s a simple way to make characters and customize them with different...
Need a way to involve your youth family history consultants? How about introducing family history to children from three to eleven? We combined both of these objectives with a Primary Sharing Time! In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the organization for children age three to eleven is called Primary. As part of our Sunday worship, the children have classes for their individual age groups then come together for Sharing Time. Sharing time...
Our stake has been focused on teaching the primary children ages 8-11 how to do family history, and our youth consultants are taking charge of teaching them. So I created a lesson plan for our youth family history consultants to use as they teach at the children’s homes. The lesson invites the children to become explorers and discover their family’s past. Four tools from an “explorer’s backpack” are used to explain family history concepts. The...
This post contains affiliate links. If you click the link and purchase the item, we receive a small commission. This doesn’t change the price of the item. Homeplace by Anne Shelby, 1995 A Grandmother tells her granddaughter the story of the home she lives in, starting 100 years before with the girl’s 4th great grandfather who built the house. The Jan Brett-like illustrations with lots of farm imagery invoke a very homey, country feeling. Each generation...
