Debbie Chikousky is a agricultural columnist that has combined her love of farming with her love of homeschooling.  Her writing allows her to be a stay at home farm mom with four children ages 20,19,17 and 15.   She utilizes free tools as much as possible in her endeavours to keep learning connected to life.

The one area that I have always felt our homeschooling curriculum was lacking in was history. The reason for this is that the available curriculum in my school division is repetitive.  Our children wanted something they could work with that was fun and possibly interactive. That is a tall order for history. How do we make learning about dates personal?

The idea to use genealogy as a history tool sprouted in my mind while listening to a grandma exclaim as she looked at a graduation picture, “Imagine all of this started with just two people!” When I glanced at the picture she was referring to, I saw about twenty people all gathered in a family picture at her grandson’s graduation. Is this not the case for many civilizations over time?

I immediately thought that there must be a learning lesson in this and started trying to figure out how to make this personal for our children. This is where the idea of using genealogy came from and I was thrilled to find the FREE online tool Geni.

“Geni is a private place for your family to build your family tree, preserve your history and share your lives.”

The Geni website is very easy to sign into and they take personal security seriously. I was granted a temporary password that I could use until I upgraded to the password of my choice. They have a full page of options where you can choose who can view your information and who cannot.

Our family has tried to explore genealogy in the past and I always found it cumbersome.  When we started using this site, I found that it did all the work for us.  The mapping starts in the center with my husband and I, and then moves outward.  The programming automatically moved the names where they belonged and prompted us with balloons.  The help area was very useful.  Videos and photos can be added to your tree also.

The other aspect to this site that I liked was that it can be interactive.  Each person that you add to your tree can be invited to the site (depending on your security settings).  Once these people have built their own profile pages, they are added to your family’s history. To fill in many of the branches on our tree, we enlisted the help of our extended family.  We regularly go back to view what has been added.

Once the information was on the site we could edit and add to it as necessary.  All the dates of marriages, deaths, births and any other important events can also be entered.  This makes it easy for us to use the information for further projects.  For example, if we are studying Anglo-Saxon literature we can look on our family tree and check if there is a relative that would have been alive then.  If there is, the children can then imagine what the life of these people may have been like.  We can research our old family albums for pictures too.  That is one way this site has made history come to life in our house!

Other ways to utilize this tool in your homeschooling curriculum are endless.  Older students could log in under character names and build family trees for complicated character sketches they are working on in creative writing.  Students of history can log in and build family trees for other historical figures and have the information at their fingertips when writing essays, etc. The site is friendly enough that even elementary age children could make themselves a simple family tree and print it for a computer project.

There are also socializing aspects to Geni that I didn’t pursue, but may be good tools if a few people wanted to collaborate on a project together.  For example, family members who were logged in to the site at the same time could work together to add information to family members’ profiles or discuss changes to their family tree.  Students working together could discuss complex characters in a novel study.  The possibilities are endless!

Overall I have found Geni to be a beneficial tool for our homeschool history component.  It is free and easy to use.  All we had to add was imagination!