My ancestors appear to be about as exciting as a
banana. I have not been so lucky as to
discover royalty, horse thieves, or great inventors in my family tree. My familial lines teem with farmers and
laborers. Sure there's the odd brick
mason, storekeeper, and hotel clerk, but that seems to be it - on the
surface. When I dug a little deeper, I
found that one of those farmers was part of a Virginia militia unit that marched to Baltimore to protect it from the
British in 1814. I found that another
farmer, my 4th great-grandfather, never married my 4th great-grandmother, and
despite having 3 children with her, married someone else and let her claim a
pauper's burial at the expense of the county where they lived. I discovered the odd fact that one of my great-grandfathers and his leg were buried a week apart. Weird, huh?
Digging deeper is where all the fun - and sometimes, disappointing - stuff is. By digging deeper you find all the great information that makes up that itty-bitty dash on your ancestor's gravestone. You know, the dash that separates the year of birth from the year of death. The dash encompasses everything your ancestor ever did between the day they were born and the day they died. I hope this family history blog of mine can inspire a young person or two (or an old person or two) to find joy in learning about their ancestor's dash.
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I would love to claim that all my kids are deeply interested in discovering their family history. They're not, and I put a lot of the blame for that squarely on my own shoulders. I found great joy and excitement in the hunt and discovery of new ancestors, and happily shared my new discoveries with my kids, occasionally. I confess that I didn't do much to involve them in the hunting process. As a result they viewed it as mostly something old people do (because even in my 20's I was old to my kids). About ten years ago, when I asked who wanted all my compiled research when I passed on to the great beyond, I was met with hemming and hawing and averted eyes. With their response to my question, or lack thereof, I realized that I had messed up and slowly began to recognize what I could have done differently
As I thought about it, ideas began to come to my mind for ways I could have involved them more. I brainstormed and eventually came up
with over 100 activities that could help kids participate in
family history in a fun and enjoyable way.
In time, I put the list online, titling the web page "101+ FunFamily History Activities for Kids."
Eventually the number of activities increased to over 200. My daily hit tally was modest
and my little page even received a Family Tree Magazine "Site of the Day" nod early
on. Then the host site, Yahoo's Geocities, went belly up.
I didn't want my little web page to die so I registered for a
domain name through a $$ site.
Unfortunately, that didn't work out because I just couldn't figure out
the intricacies of the hosting site.
Then one day I remembered that Rootsweb gives out free web space for
family history themed pages. I applied
for space, got it, uploaded my page, and promptly forgot about it. Maybe it gets hits, maybe it doesn't. To tell the truth, I've never bothered to
check. However, I've never really forgotten
about my little list of activity ideas and have decided to breathe
new life into it yet again via this blog.
