With the holidays around the corner, November is a great time to reconnect with relatives and learn more about your family history. Family Stories Month encourages people to learn about your family’s background, as this can help you feel more connected to your loved ones, your roots, and yourself.
What is Family Stories Month?
Family Stories Month is a dedicated celebration of families and the unique stories and traditions that shape their identity. Throughout the month, people are encouraged to connect with loved ones to share family histories and stories. This commemoration serves as a time for families to bond and celebrate their heritage.
Many families take this month as an opportunity to document their family stories through writing, audio, or video recordings, preserving their family history for generations to come. Family Stories Month emphasizes the importance of fostering intergenerational connections and keeping familial ties alive.
How Can You Learn About Your Family’s History?
Interview Family Members:
Arrange a time to sit down with individual members of your family to record their stories. Preserving your family’s memories can allow them to last for generations to come, in written, audio, or video form. You may even come across some stories you’ve never heard before, growing your own understanding of your loved ones. Here are some questions you can ask your family members during their interview:
- What is your favorite childhood memory? Why?
- What did you want to be when you grew up and what did you end up doing for work? If it changed, why?
- What was your wedding like? Do you remember anything funny or meaningful from that day?
- Can you share a story about an important family tradition or holiday that you remember celebrating?
Research Public Records
Utilizing public records is a great way to collect information on your family, especially if some of your loved ones have passed on and you aren’t able to ask them questions. Public records can give you information regarding immigration, marriage, and death, among other topics. If you are looking to start your genealogical research, the National Archives and Records Administration has several helpful resources, including their Start Your Genealogy Research and Genealogy Resources pages.
Preserve Family Heirlooms:
Family photos, documents, records, or even trinkets are all heirlooms that help tell your story. By protecting these items, you can help future generations to understand family stories and traditions. You could even review each photo with your family and write the information or memory associated with it.
Join Cultural Groups:
Local cultural groups can help you to learn more about your family’s beginnings and the traditions you have. For example, if you are Italian, you may benefit from joining a local Italian cultural society to learn more about Italian heritage and, by default, your family’s history. It may also allow you to learn more about the greater societal and cultural impacts that may have shaped your family’s history and memories.
Ways To Reconnect with Family
Cook Together: Organize a family meal where you and your loved ones cook a family recipe together. This is a great opportunity to learn more about where the dish came from, how long your family has been making it, and what it means to them.
Want to elevate this activity? While you’re cooking, gather other family recipes and put them all into a cookbook. If you have a family member who cooks from memory, ask them to sit down and recite their ingredients and process to you to document it. This can either serve as a record for yourself, or a gift for a family member!
Home movies night: Everyone loves a cozy movie night at home, but what about a “home movies” night? Make some popcorn, gather around the TV, and play old videos and home movies to reconnect over shared memories. This is a great time to get family members to recount what else was happening around the same time, or even behind the camera.
Game night: Incorporate your family memories and inside jokes into a game of Charades or Pictionary! Make up your own prompts using funny family stories, jokes, or nicknames. This will encourage your family to share about their memories surrounding that scenario or the history into why that inside joke came about.
Create a family scrapbook: Rather than just storing old photos and memorabilia, make something new with your memories! Bring your family together and create a family scrapbook that tells the story of your photos and connects them with other bits and bobs you’ve collected over the years. For example, you can create a couple of pages about your family vacation, arranging photos, tickets, receipts, dried flowers, and other trinkets that remind you of all the memories you made.
The process of creating the scrapbook will motivate your loved ones to share their perspectives from each memory, and the scrapbook itself will serve as a preservation of the time you spent together, in the past and the present.
Make a family playlist: Ask each of your family members for their three favorite songs are and add them all into a playlist, to play during family parties and gatherings. When everyone is gathered together, they can share why they chose their three songs.
The playlist will not only give people as opportunity to share something they love with others, it will also encourage your family members to swap stories about their songs, while building new memories as they play in the background.
Conclusion
Family Stories Month provides us with a designated time to come together with our loved ones and learn more about your family’s history, memories, and traditions. By utilizing the tips above, you can learn more about and reconnect with your family during this special time of year.
Check out the blog post below for more activities to do with your family!
About the Author
Riley de Jong, Communications Strategist at Acenda, attended the University of California – Los Angeles for her undergraduate degree in Communication and minor in Entrepreneurship. She enjoys supporting her community, telling engaging stories, and connecting with others.
Sources
https://nationaltoday.com/family-stories-month/
https://www.nationaldaycalendar.com/november/family-stories-month-november