Genealogy Game
Supplies: Photos, information on family, time

This can be fun and interesting for kids and even adults while sharing the history of your family. This takes some time and energy, but can be very rewarding. Basically you are creating cards, so the kids can play a Memory Game. The goal is to create cards of people in your family and give a brief synopsis of who they are, employment, and relationship in the family. If you have a computer you can scan in the pictures, resize them, add text and print out.

Basically, you are making baseball cards for each family member. I have found it easy to create a standard size for the cards and place the photo and text beside each other on a piece of paper. Then print, cut out and fold to create the front and back and then laminate!

Example: Get a photo of “Jim Smith” and resize if needed, but try to get them all the same size. Under the photo place his name “Jim Smith” and then create the information section for the back of the card. Born, parents, occupation, wife, kids, unique facts, etc… Once you get done with everything you will need to have 2 cards per person

FYI: I think it can be helpful for family members to learn that your rich Uncle once worked at McDonald’s or that Aunt Joan was on the swim team while attending college. And once these cards are created and the image/documents saved, you can update them and share again and again. It is even more interesting if you make cards for family history.

Here is a tip: Try and get 1 person from each family to create a group of cards or gather the information and photos for you and have them send it to you. If they can do their own set great.

Once you have started creating your set you can play several games with them:

Matching Game: Young kids
Once you have 10 or more people in your deck, you a range the cards face down. The kids take turns flip one card over at a time and then flipping another over and hope that it is identical to the first flipped card. If they match remove those two cards, and that player gets to go again. If they do not match the cards are turned face down and the next player goes. This continues until all the cards have been cleared from the game. Then the person with the most set wins that game.

Family Game – Who Is Quiz
Whether the kids have seen the cards or not, you can bring them out and say I am going to share some information about a family member and you can guess who it is. If you are heading to a family reunion this is a great intro into people they don’t know yet. If you have a large family you may want to give them a list of who you have cards for.

Now read a fact about a family member and see if the kids can guess who it is. If they can they get that card to read and review. At the end of the game the person with the most cards wins, but in a sense everyone who is listening wins.

Be creative and have fun.

This game is at its best when there is adult supervision and you can take time to learn and share stories about the person on the card.
Party Game Ideas Original by Sarah