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The Family History Fun Factor
Genres: Advice & How To, Biography, Guidebooks, History, Manuals and Workbooks, Memoir
Age Groups: 12-15, 18+
Formats: Ebook, Paperback
What would you ask your dead ancestors?
Family histories are often boring compilations of pedigree charts accented by dry narratives. Family folklore opens the door to everyday experiences and emotions that bring individuals alive. It's also an excellent way to get children involved and started early on compiling their own personal history. This handy guide provides all the information you need to start discovering, identifying, and collecting your own family's folklore. It includes descriptions of which genres are included and examples as well as a memory-jogging checklist and resources for those who might want to take it to the next level.
Reviews
Ms. Fiza Pathan on Amazon
I loved this little book about trying to preserve family folklore. The book was well written, well edited & well deserving of all praise. I loved all the ways mentioned by the author, Marcha Fox, for trying to preserve our family 'folktales' for our descendants. I liked the examples she gave & also some of the instances of her own family folklore. Being raised in a large maternal joint family myself, I have always taken the trouble of trying to record our times together in my diaries. But there are other ways to do so which is mentioned very astutely by Marcha Fox in this little book titled 'The Family History Fun Factor'. I highly recommend this book to everyone, especially to those people trying to preserve their own family folklore & are stuck about how they can do so. I really liked this short little book a lot & the author really impressed me with this very novel idea about the ways we look at family folklore & how we try to save it for our descendants. Kudos to Marcha Fox on a job well done! I hope to read more books penned by her in the near future.
Balroop Singh on Amazon
The Family History Fun Factor: How to Gather and Preserve Family Folklore by Marcha A. Fox is an excellent guide to preserve family history. It offers many ideas about collecting the experiences of family members so that they remain alive for posterity. Most of the people never think about recording the cherished moments and memories. I don’t have a single picture of my childhood. I have no idea what my grandpa looked like. Some hazy memories of what my grandma told me about her life come to my mind when I think of my family folklore. My mom has no memories of her parents as they died when she was too young and had to face troubled times of partition of her country.
I have always wished to know more about my family. Marcha inspires that instinct and emphasizes the need to gather and preserve family folklore. She tells us that whether it is cooking methods, family celebrations, festivals, transportation or how children spent their day – the next generation would be charmed by it. Technology may have made our lives easier yet family’s little activities, which seem insignificant to us, could be interesting if they are recorded. When an I-pad generation is told that we started our writing lessons on wooden slates that had to be washed and plastered everyday and a wooden pen and inkpot was required for writing, they look at me with disbelief and awe!
I am glad I stumbled across this book. I would like to recommend it to everybody. Thank you for the inspiration Marcha. Family folklore is precious and worth making the efforts to preserve it.
Robin Leigh Morgan on Amazon
Did you know that your grand-uncle Franklin rode with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders? Did know that your late aunt Betty was a nurse in a MASH unit during the Korean War? Did you know your great-great-grandmother was a Suffragette? If you’ve said NO to these questions there’s only one reason and one reason for this to be the case. There’s been no one keeping track of your family’s history.
The truth is you’re not alone for there’s only a small minutia of families who have. I believe this is because most of us are under the impression there’s nothing special about our families. We’ve probably said that none of us have done anything important like becoming a member of a small town’s board.
But, there’s the rub. While none of us might feel we’ve done anything important, who’s to say that there won’t be in our family who will. And when that time comes, how will that future ancestor know who came before him and what they did in their lives; that individual would have a void in his life.
Ms. Fox in her book seeks to help us remedy this situation by giving her readers an easy to follow guide in how to go about creating a family history for our future generations. There are ways of going about trying to backfill information about our family tree, and the author gives information to doing this as well.
While this might seem like a demanding task it can easily be turned into a fun family activity to gather all the bits and pieces, including oral histories from various members of the family, regardless of where they might physically be.
For wanting to instill a sense of pride in our family for today and futures generations, I’m happy to have given Ms. Fox 5 STARS for her endeavor here.