Tired of watching your kids spend countless hours in front of the computer playing games while they shut the rest of the world out? There's a fun little way to turn your budding computer addict into an adventurer.
I have hobbies, lots of them, far more than I have time to enjoy. One of them I stumbled upon accidently quite a few years ago is online genealogy. Oh, that's what old people do right? Research the family tree. My first impression too and most of the information I eventually uncovered admittedly came from "old people". But I found another use for this little hobby, one that has turned into several family quests away from the computer and kept us all engaged.
This started with my having a little time to kill one afternoon. Having recently heard someone talking about genealogy and family tree research, I had the hairbrained idea to plug my grandfather's name into a search engine and see what turned up. I really thought it would be impossible to find any of my kin on a website somewhere since most are relatively obscure types who came out of very hard times in the mountains of West Virginia.
To my amazement there he was, out there in cyberspace, along with several of my actual living relatives (so I knew for a fact it was the right fellow) and even a link to his social security number at some site that actually listed the numbers of the deceased. Well, I was pretty impressed by that little discovery since none in my family have done anything that would land them in history books or even on a directory list. In fact, some don't even make the phone book.
Well, one name led to another and I kept finding more and more about my family in a pretty short period of time. I actually uncovered the names, histories and even photos of relatives my own father did not know existed and it happened fast. What used to take years for researchers to uncover now took a few weeks or even a few minutes depending on how lucky one got in terms of hooking into other family researchers.
Through the course of those discoveries I started being able to tie my family roots to a variety of geographic locations. In our case we could go to some of them pretty easily. This is where the family activities evolve. Now granted, this isn't wild excitement, but it can be a fun way to get kids into useful pursuits. A direct connection to history (ours led to researching Jamestown and also the War of 1812). It also develops some incredible skills since many exercises involve using a computer, library and other resources for research.
So how do you get started and what do you do with all this seemingly trivial information. First, start by having the kids do a little leg work. By the way this can lead to some great dialogue between family members you may not connect with often. Have them conduct interviews with every family tie you can think of to gather data they'll plug into the search engines later. This can be very technical, using an excell spreadsheet or it can be a sheet of notebook paper with the information handwritten. Just write down everything that person can share with you about any family connection they share with you. Take down their bigraphical information first, including when and where you talked to them, then add in whatever they can share. Think names, dates, places - those will be the most valuable things to get for later use.
Back at the computer, again using a spreadsheet comes in handy since information will begin to accumulate quickly, start researching each name and place in turn to see what pops up. Just using google isn't usually going to yield much but you can get very lucky if you happen to stumble upon a website some distant relative has compiled for you to find. Here is where subscribing to my blogs will pay off - I'll share details - and I'll also house this information at my website beginning November 8th -
www.whiteoakattic.com - follow the links on the home page for in-depth ways to find data on the internet. It's absolutely no fun if you can't find anything about your family so knowing where and how to look is essential.
Once you start finding information then you can find creative ways to engage the family in a more hands-on manner. Can you go to the library and dig a little deeper using what you found online? You'll be surprised...many libraries have or can direct you to resources that span the country so don't count them out if your family ties don't turn out to be local. There are also droves of resources on the Internet, including places you can go to ask people to run out and either look something up for you in an archive or snap a quick picture of a tombstone, or other place of interest. Sometimes you can even download a whole family tree for yourself completed by other distant relatives who took the plunge before you.
Soon you will find yourself getting overwhelmed by all the data and how to manage it. Take a look at my website's resources...I'll talk about free software that's available to manage all this stuff. In my own case I contacted people by email and wound up receiving actual glossy photos in the mail of my great, great grandfather - a man my own father knew nothing about. I also ended up with an email pal - my own term for today's version of the penpal- in a little village in Hungary where my great grandmother grew up. She sent photos of the place to me by email - a place I'll likely never see - and I made my own grandmother happy in sharing updates on what I'd learned from time to time.
Tune in later or better yet subscribe to my feed, I'll begin a more intensive "how-to" about this here on my blog and at my website. I'd like to hear from you if this leads to a new hobby for your family and any resources you have to share with everyone. Of course I'm happy to help you too, just shoot me an email at
whiteoakattic@charter.net or through the "contact me" links on my website -
www.whiteoakattic.com
Posts
