The best kind of treasure hunt is seeking the pieces of your family's history, visiting them in preserved photos and documents, connecting the dots, and then passing the found stories along to the next generation. And there is no great time to begin than right now before schools reopen. As Studs Terkel reminds us: "We're suffering as a nation because there is roughly no memory of the past... Every family has stories to tell."
Discover your family's story with your child by starting close to Home:
1. Visit and interview relatives of all ages; be sure to take notes or tape or video their stories.
2. Go to the cemetery where loved ones are buried and make rubbings by retention tracing paper over the front of the stone/ label and rubbing the whole paper with the side of a sharpened pencil tip or peeled crayon.
3. Revisit saved scrap Books.
4. Pore through boxes of old photos. Not sure who you're looking at, take them with you whenever visiting relatives. Photo albums, too.
5. If you have one, go through the family Bible where many citizen narrative births and deaths over the years.
6. Read saved newspaper articles about your family's past doings.
7. Look for any documents set aside by an earlier novice family genealogist.
For your county and state searchers, one of your best bets is to visit your local historical society and then, in the case of Pennsylvania, for instance:
• My Pennsylvania Genealogy: Here you'll find Montgomery County records of all sorts: court, vital, census, tax, and military. Also available are obituaries and connected sites. Want a separate county, just find it on the accompanying map and click.
• The UsgenWeb Tombstone Project: Offers cemetery records, tombstone images, and so on.
• Pennsylvania Vital Records Site: Says it's "the most allembracing reserved supply for locating vital records on the Internet" and includes birth, death, marriage, divorce, and genealogy records, plus tips and other resources.
• Pennsylvania explore and Surrounding States Site: Here you'll find "the largest, most exact and respected directory of Pennsylvania historical, genealogical, and preservation societies on the web."
Extend your reach, too. A good starting place is The family History Library of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Its holdings consist of over 2 million rolls of microfilmed records, 400,000 microfiche, and 300,000 Books just for starters. It's settled at 35 North West Temple Street, Room 344 in Salt Lake City, Utah 84150-3440
You can entrance the holdings of the Church by visiting a local center; their names and addresses are available on their site.
Meanwhile, online, you'll also find a wealth of other resources, such as...
• Ancestry.com: Calls itself the world's largest online reserved supply for family history documents and family trees and allows you to "explore centuries of resources" from nearby the world.
• legacy Quest Online: Here, you can search all things from census records dating back to 1790 and Books filled with information on over 28,000 family and local histories, the Revolutionary War, the Freedman's Bank, and more.
• Cyndi's List of Genealogical Sites: Offers an allembracing directory of annotated genealogical links connected to countries, churches, and societies.
• UsgenWeb Project: Provides genealogical records, mailing lists, and web sites by state and county.
• Afrigeneas: Is "devoted to African American genealogy, to researching African ancestry in the Americas in particular, and to genealogical explore and resources in general."
• The sculpture of Liberty/Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.: Here you can find free charts, forms, family histories, the immigration records of the more than 17 million who entered America through Ellis Island, and more.
• The National Archives: Enables visitors to "research federal documents at the National Archives nearest you and scrutinize your family history.
Meanwhile, be sure to be recovery the days of your lives, too. For instance, jot down things your child says/does/experiences along the way, and then put it all together in a birthday letter each year. And never throw it away. Also consider:
• Memory Boxes: Every September, buy a good-sized, plastic sweater box, and, as the school year progresses, fill it with special photos, drawings, writings, even noteBooks. You'll end up with quite a stack of boxes and memories of you and your child-each pure joy!
• Scrapbooks: Pressed corsages, programs, letters, Valentine cards... Some things want a page of their own instead of a box jammed to the point of bursting. Talk about a roam down memory lane! Do you have a scrapbook or two from your own childhood? If not, wish you did? either way, make that happen for your child.
• Photographs & Photo Albums: Digital cameras make it easier than ever to snap away, collecting photos of yourself and your family through the years. By capturing for all time all the commonplace moments, as well as the special occasions, you'll enjoy a treasure to be savored for years to come. And be sure to request your child to print and paste the photos-with captions-in albums.
• Videotaping: Gadgets like Flip Video make taping a snap-and sharing the clips, too, online. Remember: memories usually fade with time, and death erases all possibility of recapturing them. Don't let that happen to your family, as it has to mine. Along with videotaping all your special-and not so special-moments together, encourage your child to interview and narrative grandparents, great-grandparents, and other family members, thus recovery their stories for generations to come.
• Audio Tape Recorders: If you don't have a video camera or similar device, then just tape narrative relatives as they share their experiences.
And in case you're wondering if all this tracing of roots is worth it, just ask Pennsylvania's Genevieve Gamble who went searching for her Souderton High School senior project. Although she already knew that her grandfather played in the Negro Leagues years ago, she eventually discovered, for instance, that he easily threw a no-hitter and pitched against Jackie Robinson, stunning him out; Roy Campanella was his catcher.
So get started taking a backward look and conference your past, while, at the same time, preserving your todays.
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