Getting kids interested in family history

It’s September! The weather is getting cooler here in the northern hemisphere, the leaves are changing to their autumn colours, and for a lot of families the kids are heading back to school. All this brings us the tricky question of what to do during those rainy weekends that seem inevitable as the autumn progresses.

Living DNA is here to help!

Teaching kids about their family history can be a wonderful way to spark their curiosity about the past and help them build a deeper connection with their heritage. Using Living DNA to trace your ancestry is not only educational, it can be fun as well.

Explaining DNA to kids

DNA can seem like a big, complicated idea, but it’s possible to break it down in a way that’s easier for kids to understand. Remember that you know your children best, and you’re the best judge of how complex your explanations should be, the following suggestions are just that - suggestions - and intended as a guide for you to find a place to start.

A good place to start is by explaining that DNA is like a special set of instructions inside every living thing, just like how a recipe tells you to bake a cake, DNA tells our bodies how to grow, what colour our eyes will be, and even what makes us look a little bit like each of our parents. We get half our DNA from our mum and half from our dad, which is why you might have your mum’s nose and your dad’s hair colour.

You can also explain that DNA is what connects us to our ancestors. Over time, our family has passed down pieces of their DNA to us, like a family heirloom carried in our bodies. Using a Living DNA test, we can look at these special pieces to figure out where our ancestors came from and learn more about the regions they lived in. It’s like solving a mystery about our family’s past! This will make learning about DNA a fun way to connect to people from long ago.

Using family matching to deepen the connection

Living DNA’s family matching tool will find genetic matches up to the 9th degree, so if you choose to take DNA tests as a family it’s exciting for kids to see all of the new cousins that they’ve found!

Explain family matching like having a personal detective that looks for people who share some of the same DNA as you.When we get our DNA test, we can find out if there are other people who are related to us, even if we’ve never met them before. These could be distant cousins, or sometimes even closer family members. By looking at the pieces of DNA that match, Living DNA can tell if someone shares a part of our family history. It’s a fun way to see how big our family really is and where different relatives might live today!

However, it’s important for kids to understand that family matching is something that should always be handled by their grownups. While it’s exciting to see matches, only the adults should be the ones to contact or learn more about these connections. As the parent or guardian, you will have manager permissions over the test, and the child won’t gain direct access to them until they turn 18. This is to keep kids safe, as they should never reach out to DNA matches on their own. Their grown ups will be the ones to decide how to interact with any matches that appear, ensuring that the experience is safe and supervised.

Fun genealogy related projects for kids

To help get your started, we’ve created some kids genealogy project worksheets for you to print at home, but you can work on some of these activities with just a pencil and paper.

Build a family tree

Starting with your child at the right of the page, map out their relationships to as many of your relatives as will fit on the page. You could encourage your child to speak with other members of your family if they can - through visits, facetime calls, or even letters and emails - to get more information about relatives they may not have met.

We’ve left some space on our template for your child to fill in their relatives as they find out more about them. Here’s an example of an imaginary family tree with some extras filled in. Horizontal lines mean a marriage or relationship, and vertical lines mean a child that’s resulted from that relationship, whether biologically or through adoption.

You can download our family tree for children at the right of this blog post, and print as many copies as you need.

Map your family’s ancestry

If you know about where your family members have come from, you can help your child to find the countries on a map and colour them in. Try using a different colour for each country, or each branch of the family tree. There’s a simple world map template for you to download and print at the right of this post, or you can find a smaller map to print online if your ancestry is concentrated in a smaller region, such as the UK.

Design a family crest

In some cultures, it’s traditional for an important family to be represented by some kind of symbol or emblem - be this a European crest or coat of arms, Japanese kamon, or the tamga used by Eurasian nomads.

Start by making a list of things that are important to your child or your family, and ask them to choose which ones they’d like to incorporate into their crest. You can draw a shape on paper for them to fill in, or download and print our template for your child to draw their favourite things and colour in. Our example below has cooking, books, music, and a pet dog.

Word Search

These are harder to put together yourself, but have a whole host of benefits for your child’s learning, from vocabulary and spelling, to cognitive skills like critical thinking and pattern recognition. They can even help to improve a child’s patience, resilience, and persistence.

There are lots of word search generators that you can access online, but we’ve created one for you to print and use at home. Don’t worry if you don’t have the time to find all the answers yourself - we’ve provided a helpful answer sheet in the downloads as well.

Create a diary entry

Encouraging kids to imagine what life was like for their ancestors can help them to develop empathy and a deeper understanding of history. We’ve created a template for this as well! With helpful prompts about what the world around them might have been like, to help your child to write a story in the style of a diary entry, imagining what one of their ancestors might have experienced.

Whether it’s describing a historical event that they might have lived through or simply a day in the life of a family member from the past, this activity will nurture their creative thinking. If you know specific details, you can guide them in making the story more realistic, or let them invent something from their imagination.

It doesn’t stop there!

You can make your own family history games as well!

Try making a bingo sheet out of genetic traits like hair or eye colour, or whether someone has freckles or wears glasses, or even who has dimples, and make it a game for the children at your next reunion (carefully avoiding any traits that might make Auntie June or Grandpa James feel self conscious).

Celebrate Family History month this October!

October is Family History month, the perfect time to dive deeper into your family’s story. To celebrate, we’re running a fun competition throughout the month. Kids can submit their finished projects for a chance to win a special prize!

Categories, age groups, and prizes will all be announced on our Facebook page at the beginning of October 2024, so stay tuned and be ready to get those creative juices flowing! This will be a fantastic opportunity for kids to apply what they’ve learned and express their family’s unique history in a creative way. Why not start a family tradition, building more onto your family tree, or researching a new family member each year?

Genealogy doesn’t just have to be for adults - these activities bring family history to life in a way that’s both educational and fun for kids. By connecting with their past, children can learn more about who they are, where they come from, and how they are one part of a much bigger family story. Plus, with Family History Month right around the corner, there’s no better time to get started!