Last week, I took my son to San Francisco, California, for a quick family history trip. I wanted to show him places significant to our ancestors so he could have a stronger sense of his Chinese heritage.
To help him understand the history we’d be talking about, I put together a little book for our trip. The first half of the book had our itinerary and some maps for the places we’d be visiting because this kid is a kid who likes to know what’s going on. The second half of the book had pages that briefly talked about the history of San Francisco’s Chinatown and some of the historical context for the time periods we’d be talking about.
I also included pages that had facts about the ancestors we were focusing on and pages that showed how he was related to those people. Although I included some of my Family Tree Notebooks pages in the book, these kid-friendly pages were created in Canva. Canva is a design website that’s easy to use and free if you just use basic features so I’m providing the templates so you can create similar pages for the young people in your life.
Overall, the trip was amazing and I feel very lucky that we were able to get away and spend a couple of days looking at the past. This was the first time that I realized just how much the process of putting together a family tree notebook has really fleshed out these ancestors in my mind and how connected I feel to them. It was easy to share their details and make the locations interesting, even to the nine-year-old. He’s already looking forward to our next family history trip!
