Why bother? and the one thing I've learned.--Our teenage experiment

Randy Seaver over at the Geneamusings Blog had an interesting post yesterday. It gave me another reason as to "why bother to involve your kids?" What are you going to do with all of your genealogy material after you are gone? I think this is a scary question for all of us. Is someone going to care about my years and years of research? How tragic if no one does.

The answer is really what we've been working on here. Get your family invested. And the sooner you involve them, the easier it will be to get them interested. That's why I talk about it so much on our blog. And that's why we print charts--a great way to get your family invested.

I think the one thing I've learned over the last several weeks of trying to get my teenagers involved in our family history is this: DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THEIR INTEREST. I have three teenagers with every reason not to like this family project we are working on. First, I gave them something really hard to do--extraction isn't the most exciting part of family history. Second, my kids have lots of reasons to resent family history in general--it's what their Mom and Dad have been so busy with for so many years. As teenagers sometimes do they could mis-blame family history for alot of the stress in our family. And third, they've certainly had overdoses of genealogy in the last 8 years--they are constantly surrounded by it, just not particularly their own. You would think they'd had enough.

But they've taken to it. I think they are enjoying seeing the pieces fit together, and working on something that they have been taught is important. They aren't complaining or whining that "Mom is making me do it" at all. I think they are really catching the geneainspiration of it. It feeds the soul. And that's exactly what I was trying to do. Hopefully in the end, I'll have someone to carry on my work, and I'll have children who are really well grounded in who they are and where they come from, which should help with where they are going too.