Family History Month Challenge

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 29? Here it is: Do you send an annual holiday letter summarizing the activities of you, your spouse and your kids for the past year? If not, no time like this year to start!  File each one with your family history research, or keep a notebook of letters that you’ve written and received from others. In Eowyn’s family, they keep a big binder of letters that each family contributes every year. 

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 28? Here it is: Record your own personal life story.  Whether that is in a written journal, a blog or a video journal, start telling the story of your life so that your descendants will be able to know all about you!

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 27? Here it is: Discover your family health history. This can be a useful tool to aid you and your doctors and caregivers in understanding patterns of health and illness for you and your descendants. Learning these things now could potentially save a family member!

See: Tracing Your Family Medical History

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 26? Here it is: Transcribe a record. There are so many records out there just waiting to be discovered by distant relatives, but they can’t until they’re transcribed onto the net. Volunteer a little time to help a site like FamilySearch.org or Mocavo.com put more out there for folks to search.

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 25? Here it is:

How many of us have been researching for years now? When was the last time you went back over some of the original people in your tree-most likely your grandparents, great grandparents, and great great grandparents? With new records being added daily to places like FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, AmericanAncestors.org, MyHeritage, GenWeb sites, and more, it pays off to go looking again. Just the other day Abby found a new record for her husband’s grandfather that indicated a wife before his grandmother that no one had spoken of! Go, give them a fresh perspective!

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 24? Here it is: Ask your family for some of your ancestral recipes. Food is so important to so much of our family culture, but think about how many of those dishes get forgotten over time unless someone makes a point to ask about them.

Add them to the records you keep for the person who used make them. Make a few up and take pictures and notes about it. Our families love to try (at least once) some of the things we know great, great grandparents used to eat.

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 23? Here it is: Can’t make it to the big Reunion next June in New York? Get with some of your local family and plan a satellite reunion to watch the live streamed events and plan your own fun. Let us know so we can put it on the site, and be sure to let local news outlets know so you have a great turn out!

For more details on hosting your own event, see our Branch Party FAQ!

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 22?Here it is: Start a One Place Study.

A One Place Study is a branch of family history and/or local history with a focus on the entire population of a single road, village or community, not just a single, geographically dispersed family line.

You can gain a greater understanding of your own personal genealogy by learning about your ancestors’ neighbors and studying the historical environment and events that took place within a specific locality.

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 21?Here it is: Have you thought about what will happen to your research and collection of photos and heirlooms when your gone? We all hope someone in our family will care for them but also have heard the horror stories of the box of photos and documents being thrown in the trash at the estate auction. Don’t let that be you-plan ahead! Let your family know if they don’t want it, to donate it to a local historical society or library. And don’t forget your online work. Make sure you let someone know what to do/who can handle those trees. It is never too early to plan for the inevitable.

October is Family History Month so for fun we’re giving a challenge every day of the month relating to ways you can celebrate your family, your lineage and your heritage!

Ready for Day 20?Here it is: Have you tried genetic DNA yet? Now is a perfect time get involved. Take the plunge and have a test done. They continue to become more and more affordable, and if you can talk some other family members into taking one, too, the data you’ll get will blow you away.

Check out 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA!