Family History Month

Our family recently dedicated a whole month to learning about our family’s history. It was a lot of fun for everyone. Here are some of the things we did throughout the month:

• Our favorite activity was doing the “Family History Mysteries” found in the 2015 issues of the Friend magazine. You can find them online as well. We got file folders and put each case in its own folder. Their favorite mystery was the case of the family heirloom where they got to figure out where the earrings I wore when I got married came from. Their great-grandma loved getting a phone call from them and helping them crack the case!
• My older kids enjoyed color coding our family fan chart. They put a blue box around the first person to join the church in each line. A green triangle for any pioneers. A blue triangle for those who sailed across the ocean. They also wrote where each family group’s country of origin.
• We found a few family members who fought in each of the major U.S. wars and learned a little about the war and if possible what part of the conflict our ancestor was involved in.
• We also visited a city where we found out a few of our ancestors settled in nearby. While most of our family joined the church and went west, a little pocket of them ended up just an hour away from us here in Michigan. We drove down and visited the town’s historical museum and even found a few obituaries in their records.
• An easy thing we did throughout the month was to go onto familysearch.org and look at family pictures (Our family tree was already well populated with pictures. If yours isn’t your assignment could be to post a few)
• Another thing we did was fill a jar with slips of paper containing different country of origin activities. Each day we picked one out and did it as a family. We let the kids make them up and tried to pick things that were pretty easy. Here are some things we came up with:

o   Make a meal from one of the countries our ancestors came from (You can do this for one country or each one. This was a favorite!)

o   Learn about your countries of origin (We did this for each country as well. I would check out books from the library and we would go online)

o   Do a craft from a country you came from.

• Our big activity for at the end of the month was our Blast From the Past Family Dinner. We each picked an ancestor and researched them. Then on the last Sunday of the month, we dressed up like our chosen ancestor and had an old fashion meal. Each person stayed in character all night long and we talked about what it was like to be “us” (them).  I have included a helpful planning guide if you want to have your own family history dinner.

Blast from the Past Family Dinner