Download the Family Tree app and sign on with your church account. Navigate to an ancestor you want to make a scrapbook about.

Click on their “Details”, “Spouse”, and “Parents” tabs to get a feel for the person. Maybe print off a screenshot of family members? Visit the “Documents” and “Memories” tabs to print cool things you find. Stories, pictures, newspaper articles, census records.

This is a good opportunity to teach your child what these things are and why they are useful for family history.

Heidi chose to use several weeks on this activity. She picked an ancestor, and then looked at her Family Search profile. She printed off the pictures and documents that she liked and arranged them in a little book.

I think this is good because she looked in depth at the sources and tried to piece together her ancestor’s life. She didn’t find any new sources, but she got practice in working with sources and inferring details from them.

a scrapbooklet with an old picture of a young woman. her name, and my daughter's name.

Very similar to this activity is one given to us by the Primary Presidency in our ward. They printed out the Family History Mysteries that were in the friend a few years ago. They put them in binders with lined paper and a supply bag. (And promised a reward if three were done by the end of the summer. This was really motivating to a certain child of mine.) Really well done.

binder with family history mysteries open binder with a supply bag with crayons, a pen, candy, and a toy magnifying glass

The children dug through our old bins of old stuff and found interesting objects. We told them the stories and they drew and copied and captioned.

children working on family history mysteries at the kitchen table

I think this activity in the binder could be done again and again. We had so much weird stuff with stories behind them that they might never otherwise hear. Which in some cases is fine.

Heidi found Bryan’s high school journal, read that he used to make stop motion videos starring Lego figures and a play-doh blob monster. Today she got to work on her own blob videos…