Family reunions present perfect opportunities
to research genealogy
It doesn’t seem possible, but summer will soon be here. Summer gatherings can be a great opportunity to showcase family history and encourage other family members to share.
Family Searcher
By Nina Brawn
The type of gathering you have and where it will be held may dictate how and what you share. If there will be a lot of cousins and distant relatives, a relationship chart is simple to enlarge onto a poster, and helps people understand those tricky “second cousin twice removed” things. In planning your displays, remember that everyone will not be as familiar with the faces, facts and stories as you are. You may be busy elsewhere, so make your information easy to understand.
If you are computer savvy, you can use your own photos and family history information to create professional-looking bound books with beautiful scrapbook touches. Another option is a digital photo frame, which displays one photo after another once you turn it on. It is great for gatherings, as screens sizes can be as large as 15” now. If you don’t have a digital camera, almost every company that develops photos makes many photo gift options available, such as mugs, magnets, calendars, scrapbooks and CDs.
There have been half a dozen “cookbooks” created by our family branches. Cookbooks can be as simple as photocopies, or as elaborate as professionally bound books. It is the family memories you include which will change a cookbook into an heirloom.
A trip to a craft store will inspire do-it-yourself uses for old documents and photos. You can photocopy them and transfer them to T-shirts, boxes, platters, etc. My sister, Cindy made a wonderful shadowbox with a photo of her future husband as a toddler. She found the toy he was playing with in the photo, and added other items reminiscent of a day at the beach. You can do something similar with old photos and scraps of tea-dyed lace and photocopies of wedding or other documents. These can be displays, gifts, prizes, or you can even sell them to help with the cost of reunions. The possibilities are as numerous as the items you may have available.
You can create games from your history (or your present), such as crosswords and word searches. Display handwriting samples from old and new documents and have family members guess who wrote them. See who can (correctly) list the most family middle names in 15 minutes. A “get-to-know-you” game is to list activities you know family members do or have done (teaching school, kayaking, stage coach driving) and then see who can name a family member who has done them.
If you let people know ahead of time, you can gather information as well as share. Bring video and audio recorders and cameras; and blank family group sheets to gather information from your relatives. I brought my scanner to the last reunion and got some great old photos and documents. One treasure was a baby photo of Fred’s great-grandmother! You never know what you will inspire others to share. And the best reward is increasing interest in your family.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
