Family History Treasure Hunt Take your family on a treasure hunt where you choose Mom or Dad, Grandpa or Grandma, or any other family member and visit the places important from their lives. Let your children literally tread in their forbearer s footsteps. Take pictures or shoot video and make a family history treasure hunt collection.
Family...Our Greatest Treasure! Because our families are our greatest treasures, we need to do all that we can to learn about and preserve memories of each member. We can learn so much from our ancestors and realize that they were very much like we are today, our testimonies can be strengthened by their life s experiences, and we should teach our children to love and appreciate their heritage! You may ask, How do I start to preserve memories of each family member? Start simple. Keep a personal journal, type a life history of yourself or loved ones, read books you might have about relatives, ask grandma and grandpa to tell you stories, and go on a treasure hunt! There are many ways to preserve memories of each family member. As we do so, we will become more and more interested in family history work. We can then learn how to do family search indexing, register on new.familysearch.org, and talk to a genealogist. By becoming more acquainted with our ancestors, our love for them will increase and our desire to serve them will also increase. Even if you are not a seasoned genealogist, some kind of family history is for you and is required of you. It doesn t have to be a dreaded duty. You will probably discover that it can be very rewarding and fulfilling. In D&C 128:18 it states: For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect Your testimony will increase as you learn about your ancestors. You will see that the scripture in D&C 2:1-3 is literally being fulfilled: Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming. President Packer quotes in the August 2003 Ensign: Family History work has the power to do something for the dead. It has an equal power to do something to the living. Family history work of Church members has a refining, spiritualizing, tempering influence on those who are engaged in it. They understand that they are tying their family together, their living family here with those who have gone before. Family history work in one sense would justify itself even if one were not successful in clearing names for temple work. The process of searching, the means of going after those names, would be worth all the effort you could invest. The reason: You cannot find names without knowing that they represent people. You begin to find out things about people. When we research our own lines we become interested in more than just names or the number of names going through the temple. Our interest turns our hearts to our fathers we seek to find them and to know them and to serve them. In doing so we store up treasures in heaven. 2
We should teach our children to love and appreciate their heritage. We can do this by telling them stories about our own lives, our parents lives, and our grandparents lives. We can encourage them to keep a journal and a scrapbook of important events. Take the opportunity to go on a treasure hunt and find important places to your family. You will be amazed at the quality of your Family Home Evening when you do this. Your treasure hunt will bring life to your ancestors. It will make them more real to you and to your children. As you learn about important places and things to your ancestors, you and your children will realize how special they were and that families are our greatest treasures! 3
Ideas for Your Treasure Hunt 1. Do a scavenger or treasure hunt to various places that are important to your family. Take a grandparent, a camera, camcorder, and a notebook to record stories and start driving. Drive until their heart s content! Grandparents love to tell their grandchildren all of the fun places they remember. Stop at the places they talk about if possible. Take notes as you go, so you can remember the stories behind the pictures that you take. 2. Make a list of important places, and then have your family see if they can remember where they are. Important places may include: the homes you and your loved ones lived in, the schools and colleges they attended, the places they used to like to play, the places they were married, and the cemeteries where they are buried. Visit them. 3. Associate people with their likes or talents. Grandparents can have nicknames. For example, purple hat grandma or chub. When these nicknames are used, little grandchildren can instantly visualize them and they become more real. See if your family can find special places where these nicknames were used or came about. 4. Knock on doors. Most people will be surprised that you want to stand in front of their home and take a picture, but hopefully they will be very understanding. Some people may even give you a long history of the home or invite you to see the home and reminisce. 5. Look in all the books and pictures that your ancestors have left behind. Visit the places and try to match the current look of a home or building with how it looked years ago. Try to match the people also; for example, if you have a picture of yourself at a home you grew up in, take another one of you now. Take another picture of your children on the porch or the yard where you once played. Do this with grandparents that are still alive too. 6. Collect anything that you can. For example, call a city and ask for a brick of an important building that is barely standing. 7. Capture the feeling with the kids. Express your feelings to them when you were their age of something fun or difficult that you did. For example, walking home from school or piano lessons on a muddy, manure-filled road. Let them imagine you doing this. 8. Have fun! As you do some of these things, your heart will find true treasures and you will realize what a neat heritage you have been blessed with. 4
Lisa s personal note: I am a busy mother of six children ages 4 to 14. Sometimes I feel guilty for not doing genealogy. I have tried to justify not doing it because I had so many children and responsibilities. However, part of family history is recording all the memories that we can and learning about our heritage. This has been exciting to me, and it s not as overwhelming. The entire time preparing for this sharing station became an adventure or a game. Our children were excited to visit important places to our family. To my surprise, they were actually excited to learn more about their relatives. When I told Jared, age 6, that we were going to go visit the home that mom grew up in and important places to grandma and grandpa, he said, Oh, sweet! He was so excited. I was shocked. I thought he would complain. Instead, we set out on the first of many trips to visit important places to our family. I am living within minutes of where I grew up. I was amazed that there were so many neat family places and history I had never known. My ancestors were very generous people with the Church. At least two church building are built on land that my great grandparents donated to the Church. A change has come into my heart, just as the scriptures suggest. I am more concerned about capturing everything that I can to gather this important information before our own parents pass on. They are a wealth of knowledge, or our link, to their parents and grandparents. Their stories are definitely treasures that we have now found. I particularly enjoyed the day we went to find my great grandma and grandpa s house on the East side of Salt Lake City, Utah. I felt like with every turn our children got more and more anxious, as did I, to find the house. I have vague memories of the house from when I was extremely young. We stood on the porch and took pictures. It was amazing. My mom stood and waved as her grandma used to. It was a tradition for Great Grandma to stand on the edge of the sidewalk and wave goodbye until she could no longer see you driving away. I found out that Great Grandma, our purple hat grandma as my girl s have nicknamed her, was fun to be around. She loved to take her grandkids to the movies every Saturday. She knew how to have a good time. Since learning this, I ve wanted to set aside a time when I can go to the movies just as grandma did. That made such a lasting impression on my mother, and definitely is a treasure to her. Our family enjoyed Family Home Evenings on the road. We hit every place we could in about an hour. We took grandmas and grandpas along with us, and they showed us many places that belonged to our relatives. They told funny stories and the kids loved it! One particularly funny story was of my grandpa. On his first day of school, he threw a rock through the window and broke the window of the school. He was sent home for a week from school and was teased for many years after that. The school is now someone s home. Another fun thing was visiting where my mom was born. She was born in a hospital that was then turned into a motel, and most recently a haunted house. We laughed as we stood in front of the few remaining bricks. It is being torn down today. My family has really enjoyed this aspect of family history, and we have a much greater love for our ancestors because of our efforts to capture memories (our new treasures) that were important to them. 5
Jill s personal note: After raising my 5 children I returned to school and obtained my education. I am currently teaching part-time at BYU and working full-time at my favorite occupation spoiling my 10 8/9 grandchildren. I am the family genealogist. I love searching for my ancestors and learning about their lives. Although my main goal is to find enough information to do Temple Work, I have also loved getting to know these dear-departed people on a more personal basis where they lived, and what they loved. Recently my husband John and I were in Spokane Washington at a Conference. We took that opportunity to visit some family history sites. A distant cousin, Harp Turnbull age 93, agreed to give us a tour of the family property we would have never even found it without his help. We visited the area around Mirror Lake where John Holmes homesteaded in 1900. Because of the beautiful fruit trees and abundant strawberry crop that he produced the area came to be know as Strawberry Fields. The next day we went looking for Great-Grandmother Holmes home in Spokane. We found the right street but we couldn t find the right address. We saw an elderly woman down the street wrestling to drag her garbage cans out to the curb. We rushed over to help her and then John asked her if she know anything about the Holmes or their home. It s been over 50 years since the Holmes lived on that street but this dear lady got a tear in her eye and said I loved those people. She informed us that the home had been torn down and replaced with 2 smaller homes. That s why we couldn t find the address. Last summer my daughter Stacy and her husband Sheldon traveled to Chicago to visit Sheldon s brother. I asked her to visit the home of John s Maternal Great-grandfather and to send me back a picture. Although Stacy isn t a genealogist she enjoyed walking down this Chicago street and she felt that she was visiting a place that felt like home (unfortunately the home has been torn down and a power plant erected in it s place but she took pictures of other homes on the block built at the same time). This week my grandson s are in Utah visiting from Kentucky. On Tuesday they came to Provo to see where Grandma works, and where their Dad, Grandfather, and Great-grandfather attended school. Their favorite place was the Eyring Science Center (they are both budding scientists). After their tour of the campus, we went to The Brick Oven for lunch. Their Dad, who didn t get to come, told them that they had to have pizza and root beer at the Brick Oven. I explained to them that this quaint eatery has quite a Larsen family history we have visited as a family many times, and grandma and grandpa went on their first date there (Little John thought that was a little gooey for his taste). As I visit the scenes of my ancestor s lives, I m reminded of the words to one of my favorite hymns (slightly modified). I walked today where [grandma] walked, and felt [her] presence there! (Twohig, Daniel S., I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked music by Geoffrey O Hara). 6