Parents may use the ideas below to help their children become interested in learning more about their family history. More ideas can be adapted from 9 Fun Ways to Participate in Family History.
Watch how people of all ages can be blessed by participating in family history.
Five Family History Activities for Children and Youth
1. Decorate your family tree
- Help children download a family tree to fill out and decorate. As you fill out the tree together, you can share stories about living family members or memories you have of deceased family members.
2. Act out stories from family history
- Have a dress up night where you and your children reenact family history. Watch how one family history consultant involved children by acting out their family stories.
3. Go through Grandma’s trunk
- Display favorite family heirlooms and discuss the story behind them. This can be done with immediate family members, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Learn more about how to find and use these heirlooms in family history work.
4. Explore the Youth and Family History section
- The Youth and Family History section provides tips for youth on how to get started on family history, videos and advice from other youth who have become involved, and messages from Church leaders. Share it with your teenagers and other youth.
5. Play “The Ancestor” game
- Prepare a six-generation pedigree chart on a large piece of paper, filling in only the children’s names and leaving the other spaces blank. (Make a key to the whole chart so you know how it should look when completed.)
- For each blank space on the chart, make a separate card containing the ancestor’s full name and listing some information about that person. For example, “Ira Walter Gardner. I was born in 1849 in Sweetwater, Wyoming, while my parents were crossing the plains.”
- Using the information on the cards, each person tries to deduce where on the chart his or her cards should go.
- Pass out the cards.
- At each turn the player asks yes or no questions about an ancestor. As long as the answer is "yes," the player can continue to ask questions.
- If a player puts his or her card in the wrong space or gets a "no" answer, the turn is over and passes to the next player until the chart is filled out.
