Family History for Kids

If you are interested in finding out more about your family history there is a brilliant book to help you get going, Family History for Kids by Emma Jolly. You are never too young to start finding out about your family history. In fact it is better now while your grandparents and maybe even great grandparents are still alive so they can tell you about their family lives.
The book has colour codes as some subjects are relevant to the National History Curriculum for key stages 2 and 3. It has projects for you to do at the back of the book and again there are codes linking them.
It tells you about the origins of surnames which I found interesting. I didn’t know they came about in this way.
The great thing is that it deals with explaining the whole history of a family. It gives a step by step approach to talking to people in your family about what they did for a living, what they ate then and comparing it to now.
It will show you how to go about filling in your family tree. This is one of the first things you will need to do. Hopefully it will also make you want to find out more about your family.
You can also link your family to events in history. There is a quiz on jobs that people did in the past. I have to say some of them I had never heard of. It was fun trying to guess and then discovering what they did do.
It will help if you examine old family photographs so that you can gather more details from family members when you ask about them.
Asking certain questions will also jog their memory and it helps you discover more.
It goes into whether women worked, people who have immigrated and how you can find out more from the internet and other sources.
It also shows you how to look at important family documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates, letters, military documents and the census that is a record of every family in the country. It is information that is gathered by the government every 10 years.
Writing information about yourself and other family members doesn’t just help with your own memories it will also help future generations to know more about your family. If you would like to buy a copy of Family History for Kids by Emma Jolly then visit www.amazon.co.uk
© Children's Web Magazine 2009