10 Innovative Ideas To Engage Your Family With Their Family History

10 Innovative Ideas To Engage Your Family With Their Family History From The Book: Zap The Grandma Gap: Connect To Your Family By Connecting Them To Their Family History.

1. When you find yourself sounding just like your father, or just like your mother, stop and tell your family members about where and from whom those sayings come.  When little superstitions or quirky or profound sayings come up, point out their origin and make a teaching moment happen with a story or a picture.  (pg 117)
2. If family history is boring then you are doing it wrong.  Family history encompasses all sorts of topics, music, language, culture, food, fashion, etc, etc.  Move to the part that interests your family and find out what your ancestors were doing with that favorite aspect of your history.  (page 34)
3. Keeping good track of the sources for your family history information is critical because source citations give future generations something to build on.  Well documented sources will help others in analyzing and building on your research and will be crucial to future family member's successes.  (pg 156)
4. Most likely the everyday food you cook already contains a mixture of the recipes that were handed down from your family members.  Record your family recipes and make sure your family knows a little bit about the people who cooked those recipes before you.  When there are tricky instructions, make an event out of making the food together so that the next generations can continue the tradition.  (pg 113)
5. Encouraging journal keeping helps a person think through what is going on in their lives and preserves the present for future generations.  Likewise, when a mother or father, grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle consistently records the love they have for the children in their family and keeps a record of the cute things they do, they create a great keepsake for the coming generation.  (pg 95)
6. Look for the time period and culture of your ancestors in the entertainment you choose.  Try their genre of music.  Point out similarities in movies or TV series that relate to your ancestor's lives.  Even family movie night could produce more understanding about the cultural forces that helped to form your family.  (pg 120)
7. Creating a time capsule can help your family members think about their future family and what life will be like at a later time.  When creating the capsule, share an artifact or heirloom from your family's past and talk about how important the decisions they make now are to the future generations in your family.  (pg 91)
8. Use the Library of Alexandria Rule to make sure your family history information survives into future generations.  The more copies there are of your family records, the more likely they are to survive.  Share, share, share your family history information so that it is disseminated and thus preserved for someone to be able to find a copy later.  (pg 184)
9. Don't worry if you need to resort to incentives or even bribery to engage your family member's help with a family history project.  Many hard core genealogists will tell you that they first became involved because their grandparent paid them to help with their family history efforts.  (pg 64)
10. Curiosity is best encouraged when you don't over program the youth in your family.  Give them a problem you've been working on and encourage them to help you find more.  Even if you think you know everything about a particular part of your family, you'll be amazed if you stand back and watch where they go with it.  (pg 35)