Family History

We love family history at our house. We don’t do a lot of new research, since most of what can be done reliably has been done. Because of this, we've chosen to focus our family history efforts on sharing what we already have and teaching our children about their ancestors (fondly known as "grancestors" at our house).

The first thing my husband and I started doing together was to visit family cemeteries. I love to go to cemeteries. We've been to family cemeteries in New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Idaho, and all over Utah. It’s always exciting when we find a familar tombstone.

My husband also put together a book of short stories about his ancestors that would appeal to children. He handed them out at a family reunion and his cousins loved them.

We did the most "real" family history when we were in law school. First, my husband started a family history website. It took some time, but it has been very helpful. We get several emails a month from distant relations, and they often have new information.. It’s not like most genealogy web sites, since we have stories and pictures instead of pedigree charts.

My husband also came up with a family history card game. It's basically fish, but highly personalized. Here are the instructions and here is an example of a card (we did type it and print it, instead of handwriting them). My boys are just 4 and 5 and can't read well, but we play with the cards that have pictures. They have learned the names of all their grancestors with pictures, and I tell them short stories about them as we play. The card game has been the best thing we've done to teach our children about their grancestors.

One of the best things I did to get more information was to write to all the people who had submitted information to the LDS Church. I found the addresses through Familysearch. I wrote asking specifically for stories and photos of our ancestors, and I had a very good response. I had almost no stories or pictures from my mother's side, and now we have more than I could have hoped for.

Once I had all the pictures we could find, I printed them as 8x10s and framed them in matching black frames from Wal-Mart (you'll have to stop reading now, since I shop at Wal-Mart). We have 30 picutres on the wall now.

The final thing we've done is to gather all the stories we have and put them into a book. I’ve printed them for each of my sisters, in addition to having it all on the website.

None of this has really taken a lot of time, since it has been spread out over many years. We haven’t done much that’s new for the last few years, but we’ve been able to use the resources we put together and family history is part of our everyday lives now.