My Family Story Skill Building Badge

My Family Story is part of the Brownie Quest Skill Building Badge set.

  Step 1. Explore Family Stories: We spent a lot of time going through photo albums and my genealogy binders. I keep old photos, birth announcements, and obituaries in the genealogy binders. They are organized by family group sheets. I told her the family stories that I remembered. We read about how in the 1600's one of our ancestors was kidnapped by pirates and ransomed! One of our most notable family stories is about Frances Slocum. She was taken by Indians as a child and there is a state park in Pennsylvania and a state forest in Indiana dedicated to her. There have been some books & publications written about several of my ancestors as well, so I shared some of those with her.

  Step 2. Know Where Your Family is From: We got a lot of info from our family Gedcom. We have English, Irish, Dutch, German & American Indian (Mohican-Wappinger) heritage. We put tacks in the world map to show everywhere we have ancestors. (That we know of...) I printed off the flags from those countries and we used them as cupcake toppers for a cupcake decorating party!

  Step 3. Make a Story Tree: We used the template provided in the pamphlet for this activity. I converted it into Photo Shop and we added pictures of family members to complete the worksheet. She has 8 grown brothers and sisters, so we put them in as family groups - though we still ran out of spots! We added journaling after I got this picture to post.                                                                                                                       Step 4. Find an Object That Means Something to Your Family: Since we don't have any family heirlooms (except for a small coin collection my father gave me), we decided that our scrapbooks fit that bill. We did talk about the coin collection as well. She loved looking through the old coins. It represents time that I spent with my father while we sorted coins for it, so our scrapbooks would represent that time spent together for us.

  Step 5. Share Your Family Story: We added some pages to our scrapbooks. I do chronological photos and journaling in our scrapbooks, so we updated several weeks worth!

My Family Story Binder Card