Incorporate family history into your reunion

Considerincorporating the relevant themes of family history and genealogy into your next reunion program. Genealogy is something that should be part of every family reunion, even if it’s just a little corner of it. Incorporating family history helps members know who they are and how all the people are related.

People are curious. Presenting family history can be fun and exciting to reunion attendees. It can be exciting for the family genealogist or historian to share all those fascinating findings about your common history.

This list of ideas may give you a place to start to incorporate family history and genealogy into your reunion program. { Choose a reunion date that coincides with a milestone birthday.

Ancestors’ birthdays, anniversaries or Grandma’s 90th can be a wonderful opportunity to explore the life of someone who has a long history. Surprise Grandma! Explore the stories of her life, engaging all her progeny in research and presentations. Include lists of what life was like all those many years ago including prices of common items: houses, cars, groceries.

{ Choose a significant reunion site. Choose a place where an ancestor was born, where the old farm, homestead or ranch is or once stood, or even a town that was settled by your ancestors. Take a field trip or a tour and tell stories about the places. Include stops at churches and cemeteries as well. If it’s a place where no current member lives, engage a genealogist, historian or local presenter from the area to join and tell the stories about the history of the area when your ancestors lived there.

If none of these locations is near your reunion site, consider a trip to a historical museum, battlefield, or re-enactment event that relates to the history of your family.

{ Base the reunion around a culture. Many families are a mix of cultures. Pick a prominent culture or offer to honor a different culture at each reunion. Plan decorations, activities and entertainment around that culture. Have members ready to talk and tell stories about the history and culture. Highlight foods that are prominent from those regions or countries. Provide recipe cards to share as a reunion souvenir.

{ Make displays

Display current photos, a large family tree, a timeline or a pedigree chart. From the family’s common ancestor, create charts for every branch of the family. The more visual you make genealogy, the more interesting it is. Memorabilia, artifacts and pictures will also intrigue members. Make and stash a family time capsule or perhaps one each year to open ceremoniously 10 or 25 years later. Decide and announce ahead of time what will go into the capsule so members can bring their donations.

{ Play games that have been passed down through the family. Urge grandparents to share the games they played as kids until dark before the advent of television. Duck, Duck, Goose; Kick the Can; Red Light, Green Light; Captain, May I?; Red Rover; Scavenger hunts; Who’s telling the truth? Or plan a scavenger hunt. These are all described in the summer issue of Reunions magazine (v31n2) on ISSUU.com/reunionsmag

{ Set aside story time.

Tell stories of ancestors. Celebrate the spirit of family history. Read diaries and letters about their daily and extraordinary lives. Ask older family members to tell stories from their past, their childhoods, young adulthood, early marriage and family years. This is a perfect opportunity to employ the technical skills of younger members. Record the stories. Video tape or make movies of the stories and promise to share them at a later reunion when the tellers are no longer there to share the stories themselves. Establish a family repository of written and electronic histories for all to reminisce and share.

ThisScrapbook section of Reunions magazine is intended to contain a potpourri of information we find and collect that we feel might be useful to reunion planners. Reunion School, a list of in-person and online workshops, has long been a part of this section, as has Hospitality Answerman by Dean Miller found on page 39. Other items we find or are submitted for consideration. We invite you to submit things you have found useful as you plan your reunion for us to share with other planners. We will always credit the sender unless you ask us not to. Please include your name, the name of your reunion, the city and state where you live and how we can contact you in case we have questions.

We hope reunion planning workshops will come back soon in many places. Many have been held as conference calls and zoom meetings since 2020 and that may continue. This list is provided as a service to reunion planners. Basic listings are free to workshop hosts.

Reunion planning workshops are exciting opportunities for planners to learn how to organize reunions. These workshops are ideal for beginners and a resource for experienced reunion planners looking for fresh, new ideas. Most are one-day events and are free though they require pre-registration.

Scheduled events are listed in chronological order on the web page for those who have set dates. Then, there is a list of organizations who have provided workshops in the past but have not set new dates. You should contact them to ask about plans for their next workshop. Other good sources for workshops are genealogy societies and their conferences. Check program plans and if you belong to a society, ask the program chairperson to arrange a reunion planning workshop or program. We add new workshops to the web as soon as we learn about them and announce them in our two monthly newsletters.