Guest Author - Terrie Lynn Bittner
Is it hard to get your children interested in family history? One way to make it feel important is to plan a special family night in which you show the children all the work, travel and complications that came together to bring you and your husband to the same place at the same time so you could marry and give birth to your children. To do this, your genealogy should go back a good
distance, hopefully into other countries. Even if you don't have all the lines back a long way, use what you have. This requires fairly complicated preparation, and is best suited for serious genealogists who love this sort of thing!
Needed: A large wall map, yarn, tacks or tape (or some other way to fasten the yarn and papers, your family history, a large printed family tree and smaller ones for each member and a lot of time to prepare! You may also like a simple black and white world and US map drawing for each family member.
In preparation, create a time line for each line of your family. Place a large wall map of the world on your wall. Beside it, post a large wall-size family tree. (PAF 5 can make one of these for you.) Create individual trees for each family member so they can follow along. You may want to create brief summaries of the direct line ancestors, and also the most interesting stories of these families. In addition, make note of historical events that might have affected your family. If you have a wall time line of world history, you may want to add it to the display. Make tags with the names of each direct descendant.
The hardest part of the preparation is figuring out who came from where. This needs to be done in advance. You want to include each direct line ancestor. It is much easier to do this with printed records than it is with the trees on your computer. Begin with the oldest date. Find out which married couple was born on this date, and start your story with them. Note the names, birth dates
and places of birth. Also note where they died, and any moves, particularly immigrations.
When you tell the story, you will have tags for each direct descendent. My earliest relatives go back into England, Germany, and even the United States in the 1600s. I would place tags for the one who was furthest back. Suppose I start with someone in England, married to someone in England. Their daughter marries someone who was born in Ireland, but who came to England. I would have tags marking the places in England and in Ireland where these people started. Then I would draw a yarn line from Ireland to England, to show how the second generation came to together. Suppose this young couple immigrated to the United States. The yarn would travel across the ocean to their new home. If your genealogy is varied, you will soon have tags and yarn coming from a variety of places in the world. When your family is safely in the United States, travel across the country with them. My family entered the United States in Connecticut, Plymouth Rock and various other places along the coast. They gradually moved westward, finally settling in Kentucky on my father's side and Ohio on my mother's side. Still not much chance of both lines getting together.
As you teach, let the children place the tags and yarn. Emphasize how far away your ancestors were to your current home, and even to each other. Dramatize a bit, worrying about how they will ever get together. Show all the things that could have gone wrong. Do you have a soldier? What if he had gotten killed before getting married? What if your family had waited out the potato famine, instead of coming to the United States, as your husband's family did? What if the famine had never happened, and everyone had stayed put in Ireland? How would that have affected your family?
Fortunately for me, some of my father's side of the family decided to move to Ohio, where my mother's family had been since before the Revolutionary War. Whew! But, my husband's family had long since left Ohio, even though they actually lived in the same area as my family at one time. They were all the way in California! How would we ever meet? My aunt resolved that problem by marrying a Californian and moving, taking my grandmother with her. We soon joined her, but still in the wrong county. When I was a teenager, my parents longed for a more rural area, and we moved to an area near the town where my husband was now living. I joined the church and met him. (Point out conversion as a factor if it is one.)
When I look at all the moves and all the seemingly remote historical events that led to various immigrations and emmigrations my family had to make before joining with my husband's family, I'm rather impressed at how hard God must have worked to get everyone in the right place at the right time. As your children become aware of this, genealogy will seem more interesting and more
important. It's not just the story of people who are related to you, it is the story of how you came to be a family. It is a perfect opportunity, as you say your family prayer that night, to give thanks for this miraculous event.
