3 Ways to Hook Your Kids on Their Family History

When you’re a parent, it can be a difficult challenge to get your kids to engage with your family’s history.  Just remember, though, that researching your family’s history doesn’t need to be a dull task that your kids have to endure; instead, it can be an adventure which you and your family can journey on together.  So to help you with the essentials, here are 3 major steps to hooking your kids on your family’s history.

Step 1: Preparing For Your Adventure

Ask your kids to go on a treasure hunt where instead of looking for gold, they’re searching for family scrapbooks and photographs. This is a fun preparatory activity which your kids are bound to enjoy, and in the meantime, they’ll help you to collect all of the basic resources you’re going to need in order to begin your search back into your family’s history.  It’s also an excuse for your kids to visit the other members of your family and ask them about their own core family’s past.

Step 2: Find Other Family History Explorers

It’s most likely that your kids are more tech-savvy they you are, so let them sign up to genealogy social media pages to help find other like-minded family history explorers who could give you tips and share online resources with you.  A good place to start is to like the Find My Past Facebook page as you’ll be able to network easily with the largest group of social media users online.

Step 3: A 21st Century Search method

You might not want to subject your kids to a DNA test, but it’s likely that they’d find it exciting to see your results come back from a company like company like Easy DNA.  It’s easy to overlook the fact that kids are natural scientists – they love to discover and learn – so seeing your family history accurately mapped out in front of you will be enough to light up their imaginations. When you’ve got a list of names in front of you, you might even then ask your kids to locate any living relatives on social media sites, which provides them with an exciting opportunity to develop their conversational skills, helping them to build confidence.        

So, although at first thought, family history might not sound like something your kids could be excited or motivated about, by going about it in a certain way, you can turn what has the potential to be a dull chore into something exciting and engaging.