Part 1 of this blog post explored how to get started on a homeschool family history project. Part 2 explores how to really have some fun and expand the educational potential of your project.
Gathering information about the who, what, when, and where is a big part of exploring any family’s history. The facts we gather allow us to continue our research, giving us a direction for our next delve into interviews and archives. But humans are ultimately storytellers. Our days revolve around the stories we tell, from gossiping around the water cooler, to the TV shows we can’t seem to get enough of, to the lessons taught in schools, to the sales statistics we share in business meetings. Books, news, games, social media – the human world revolves around stories, and becoming aware of your family’s own stories is what will make the experience the most fun and educational.
Question and imagine. While exploring your family’s history, you can provide your children with the opportunity to use their imaginations, to really get immersed in what life was like for family members in the past. They might come up with all kinds of questions and ideas, and I encourage you to let them imagine and pretend as much as they can. Here are just a few things they might want to know more about: What kinds of games did our ancestors play? How did they get their food? How did they cook it? How did they send and receive messages? How did they clean the house? Where did they get their clothes and shoes? Did they go to work? What jobs did they do? How did they entertain themselves? How did they travel, and where did they travel to? What were their vacations like? What did they do with their garbage? How did they get better when they were sick? What was it like before the internet?
Bringing out items that have passed through multiple generations is one way to answer their questions, and probably encourage even more. Raid the attic, the basement, the closets, and the garage in search of items that belonged to someone before you. Contact other family members to have them show and tell about their items to your kids online, or maybe even mail you something to borrow or to keep. Then, try to make it hands-on: let them dress up in old clothes and jewelry, have a tea party with great-great-grandma’s china, or try to read an old letter. Family bibles, handmade quilts and doilies, sets of china, antique tools, pieces of furniture, jewelry, recipes, clothing, photo albums, toys, journals, postcards or letters – these are all items that have stories of their own, and even if they didn’t belong to someone in your own family, they can give a firsthand visceral impression of what life used to be like.
Exploring the question “what did your ancestors eat?” can provide a lot of opportunities for fun and learning. If you have access to them, make some favorite family recipes. If you aren’t sure how to make them yourself, you can have grandparents or aunts or uncles connect online with your kids from the kitchen and teach them how to make something from their family recipes. Some of our family favorites are pumpkin bread, pierogies, chocolate jumble cookies, chicken in a homemade marinade, eclairs and cream puffs. If you don’t have any specific family recipes, you can try baking your own bread (without a bread-maker!), churning your own butter from heavy cream, or making other staple foods from when your ancestors were alive. In addition to some basic hands-on cooking and baking skills, your kids will also get first-hand experience with reading a recipe (maybe even one written in cursive or using historical cooking terms), using fractions and measurements, and getting a “taste” of history. As a longer-term project, you could grow your own fruit, vegetable, and herb garden, which many of our ancestors did as a normal way of life.
When my kids were younger and we were lucky enough to find a long-buried midden (a refuse heap containing artifacts of past human occupation) on our family's property, we explored the question “what did your ancestors do with their garbage?” In addition to discussing the differences between garbage disposal then and now, we used the opportunity to practice some archaeological dig skills, like establishing a grid, making a grid chart, drawing pictures of what we found, taking notes, using brushes for gentle excavation, and more. We found some pieces of old bottles and dishes, a couple blacksmith-hewn nails, and even the back of an old metal hairbrush, the bristles all gone, with a family member's initials engraved on the back. Each item held a story of its own. The soil had already been disturbed as part of a small building project, and nothing we found was of significant historical or financial value beyond our own interest, but it made for a pretty cool several-day project, exploring local and family history and getting a hands-on feel for a potential future career. While not everyone will have this same experience, if you start down the road of family history research, you never know what kinds of adventures you might have.
Allowing time and resources for pretend play is a great way to answer (and invite more) questions. My kids have always loved learning things in a hands-on way. We’ve explored our history by dressing in costume, writing with quill and ink on parchment, learning how to swing-dance, washing clothes in a tub with a washboard and a hand-cranked wringer, using candles or lanterns for lighting, making historic recipes with the tools available at that time period, making and mending our own clothing, cooking over an open fire, playing games and with popular toys from history, weaving and knitting, taking horse-drawn wagon rides, and so much more. Tying any of those same activities to what your ancestors may have experienced adds a whole new level of connection and understanding for kids.
For children and adults alike, when we are faced with our own pending disasters, it may ease our minds some to know what kinds of tribulations our ancestors faced and survived. If we take some time to think about all those who came before us down the long line through history, knowing some of the illnesses and hardships they went through, it should help to remind us that we must be made of tough stuff, or we wouldn't be here in the first place. It often helps to motivate me when I am feeling overburdened and sorry for myself, to think of the tough times some of my own family members have gone through and the amount of effort they had to exert on a daily basis just to survive and provide for their families. As we are gathering family stories, it is interesting to note that the current pandemic will itself become a story that we tell our grandchildren in years to come.
Expand your vocabulary. As you explore your family’s history, be sure to talk about basic family relationship terms, such as how your kids' aunts and uncles are your sisters and brothers, and their grandparents are your parents. My mom often takes time to make distinctions about family connections when talking to our family’s little ones, such as: "You are his cousin because your mommies are sisters," or "I am your grandma because I am your mommy's mommy." This seems to help clarify things for them sometimes, and I have noticed that it often takes several repetitions, in several different combinations, before those connections make sense to them. Foster and adoptive families were common through history, as well, and knowing about them within your own ancestral lines can provide the groundwork for empathy for some, and a sense of connection for others. My partner and I discovered that we both have ancestors who were adopted.
You will very likely come across various other terms that are confusing at first, but can be fun to learn and stump your friends with later. For example, do you know how a great-great-uncle is related? (The brother of a great-grandparent, or husband to a great-grandparent’s sibling.) How about a third cousin twice removed? (A grandchild of a cousin that is three generations below the great-great-aunt and -uncle that the third cousins have in common. See why they use shorthand?) There are way too many terms for me to go over in this post, but rest assured you can easily find definitions and explanations (and sometimes diagrams) of all the various terms if you do some online searching. (Or, if this seems too tedious or overwhelming for you, you can proceed without most of them and still get along just fine.)
As you connect your family to locations through history, you may instill an interest in your ancestors' languages. The new vocabulary you are learning might well include words from another language.
Make connections. In the past, each new generation may have moved only a few houses away from their parents and in-laws, and kept up frequent interactions and large family gatherings as common practice. As times progressed, and methods of transportation improved, it became much more common for families to spread out, often across the globe, creating small independent family groups who have little interaction among relatives. Gathering your family’s history can provide a reason to reduce the distance (even if only electronically) and bring families together in ways that would likely never happen otherwise.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, it can be exciting to find shared interests among other family members. This can be a boon to parents who are looking for a way to help their children explore and develop their own interests, even if they aren’t interested in the same things themselves. It’s fun to share what we know and share stories of our experiences with others who have similar interests. More so, it provides a connection to society, to our family in particular, that goes beyond the regular school-day, workday, or sports-related experiences we normally have, developing our feelings of security, empathy, and understanding. The gap between generations may sometimes seem too huge to leap, but asking any elder “what did you used to do as a kid?” may spark a connection to one another in the shared experience of at one point having been a child, while at the same time igniting an appreciation for both simple pastimes and the many benefits and opportunities we have in this technological age.
Take it further. What do you do with all this information once you’ve gathered it? Well, you don’t necessarily have to do anything with it, as the experience and the learning are in the journey, and a final destination is not required. However, for those who might like to have some kind of product or “final” project to show for all their hard work, here are some ideas for what you can do:
Timelines. Make a family timeline to display, or a family timeline book to share. These can range from a simple hand-drawn timeline on some banner paper on the wall, or a notebook with each year written at the top, to a full-color printed poster or a self-published book.
Get software. Family Tree MakerTM and other computer software programs for genealogy allow you to store the data you collected in an organized and easily retrievable fashion, including printable charts, spaces for lengthy notes, and photo attachments. However, software programs can be expensive, so I recommend them only if you get really involved or interested in the project and want to keep track of your discoveries at a higher level.
Create a webpage. You can start your own family-access-only web page that has family history and updates available. Alternately, you can create a page to add to the USGenweb or other online genealogy or history project.
Write it. You or your children can write a short story, a picture book, or even a lengthy treatise to record one or some of your family stories.
Make a game. Make a "Did You Know?" trivia game about your various family members and ancestors, then play it as a family to see who can remember the most.
Decorate the wall. If you own your own home (and plan to stay there pretty much forever), you can make a permanent full-wall family tree mural somewhere in your house. If you don’t own your home, or don’t plan to stay there forever, you can use a bedsheet or a super-big canvas to create a wall-hanging of your family tree. My interest in delving into my own family’s history started with a school project of a huge tree drawn on paper, with each of my family members identified as an apple on that tree.
Create a time capsule. Create a time capsule for future generations of your family. Include what you’ve learned about your family’s history, items from the past, items and stories from the current generation, and/or your predictions for your family of the future. Pass down the location of the time capsule to your children or grandchildren.
Make it 3D. Make a papier mache 3D tree with a wire and/or cardboard frame, then hang small cards with family member photos or drawings, names, and information on them from the branches with some string. Other options include hanging your cards on an artificial Christmas tree or a branch from a real tree instead.
Map it. Trace your family's moves around the world through history. Discover when and where your ancestors arrived in the country you now call home. We keep a big framed poster of a world map on our wall and use it frequently in our homeschool activities. Since it is in a frame, we can write on it with dry-erase markers, or tape string to show a path, or put sticky notes on it to label various areas.
Give a gift of family. Make a fancy version of your family’s pedigree chart and give it to someone in your family as a gift. I will never forget the Christmas I gave my grandmother an album with her family’s history in it, complete with kinship charts for all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, her 11 brothers and sisters, her parents and grandparents, and beyond, as well as photos and all the notes and stories I had collected about them. She was so overwhelmed that she cried (and my grandmother was not one to easily cry). An added benefit: In looking over the album and sharing it with family members who came to visit, she was able to fill in some blanks and collect more information that she then shared back with me!
Open more doors. As previously mentioned, exploring and recording your family’s history may become a forever project for those who develop an interest. With that in mind, here are some ways to explore more once the current pandemic has passed:
Visit re-enactments and living history museums that depict life as it was during your ancestors’ time, or visit museums that house history from those time periods.
Visit locations your ancestors came from, lived in, or passed through.You can make them destinations of your future vacations.
Host or attend a family reunion.Use the time to share what you’ve researched so far, and ask for additional information while you are there.Make connections.
Visit a History and Archives Department that may have local or family historical records.The benefits of these departments are mentioned in Part 1 of this post, and the experience of visiting one can provide a wealth of education all on its own, as your kids ask you what a phone directory or microfilm machine is.
So what will your family history research uncover? Will you discover heroes and horse thieves, civic leaders and bawdy tales? Will you get involved in a group or community related to what you find? Will you learn how your ancestors played a role in the formation of history as we know it? I’d love to hear about your adventures and discoveries while researching your family history. Please tell us your story in the comments section below. Be sure to subscribe to receive notices about future posts!
I want to thank my own family for their encouragement and support, not only in developing this blog, but in general over my lifetime. I never would have succeeded without you. Thank you!