Involving young men of Deacon age
I am the Temple and Family History Leader for our ward. I have been asked to present to the Young Men of Deacon age a 15 -20 minute presentation. Has anyone presented a youth discussion for Deacon age youth?
Thank you for your time.
Comments
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share real stories about research and/or ancestors
dont bore them with all the details of the research method
just get them interested enough that they will start looking into the real people who were their ancestors
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Teach them how to use Ordinances Ready. https://www.familysearch.org/temple/ordinances-ready
Show them how they can find out their relationship to each of the person's they reserve via Ordinances Ready. Have them look at the sources and / or memories that may be attached to each of these people and have them share what they have learned about one of the people. It maybe something like they served in the military, what their job was (based on census), etc.
Then have them look at their own fan chart - click on one deceased ancestor and see if they can learn something about the person they didn't know before. Have them share with the group.
Using the Family Tree app - have them access "Relatives Around Me" - see how they are related to each other. Their relationships with each other will change when they realize they are cousins (even if it is distantly).
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To add to what has been said the link below has a bunch of ideas that could be used to help the deacons get started.
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When we had a Young Men family history night recently, each young man worked with a consultant individually (that's what we always do), and we started this time by taking them to the "Activities" section of Familysearch. We focused on the Pioneer Ancestors, Nauvoo ancestors, and Missionary ancestors activities and they really enjoyed seeing which of their ancestors were pioneers, how old they were when they traveled across the plains, how long the journey took, etc. It made it very personal for them. We asked them what jobs their teenage pioneers might have helped with along the trail, etc.
Then, we taught them Ordinances Ready and helped them reserve some names for the temple. We did the same thing with the Young Women a couple of weeks later.
As mentioned above, the Relatives Around Me app is always fun for youth and adults.
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Thanks to all for your comments and suggestions. My wife and I have given presentations to the YW and YM since the original post.
The main take-away from these group presentations is that we, my wife and I, had the goal. That goal was to create interest. We realized that most youth that we new in our Ward had the impression that Family History was "for old people".
The YW presentation was in a home. The YM presentation was in the Relief Society room at our chapel.
We did not know how many would be in attendance, but on the average we had about a half dozen youth for each presentation.
The only AV we used was our laptop. In the chapel the YM counselor obtained a large screen TV from the library to use and we connected to the laptop. For the YW, we were in home, where we used the YW leaders husbands Smartphone to connect to a large screen TV in the home - the laptop we brought but could not be used since we were not able to connect to his internet in the home.
In all the presentations, we asked the Youth if they had FamilySearch accounts. If they did have accounts, we tried to use one of the youth accounts and have them sign-in, We used from FamilySearch the Activities Page, such as, "All about me" or "Compare a Face", etc. The Activity Page, especially "All About Me", provided some laughable moments which eased apprehension about Temple and Family History.
Along with the presentations, especially in the home of one of the YW Leaders, the husband and the leader became a great support for the YW ages 12 - 14 ages. The best part of the presentation, for the YW was, there was inspired arrangement made with another ward that we had a temple baptisms for our YW and the youth of the other ward.
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Since you only have 15-20 minutes you could do as indicated by the others above. You could also set up another activity to teach them indexing. If you have a FHC near you you can have the YM quorum presidents plan an activity and set up an appointment with the FHC to do indexing for an hour. You as a consultant can follow up with the FHC leader to ask for other consultants there to help you help them. There is a short tutorial about indexing that you can have them review first so they have the overall indexing concept. Here is the link -- click on the try a guided tour
Make sure that you connect with the YM leaders so that they can insure that the YM have their user name and password if they already have a FamilySearch account. If they do not have a FamilySearch account you can help them set that up. They YM leaders (usually a member of the bishopric should have the youth church membership record number) so that theycan set up a member FamilySearch account instead of a public account.
It is a great opportunity to help them learn indexing. Be aware that you may want to pre-select particular indexing batches that are printed or typed. Many of the youth now do now read cursive.
Hopefully that will help you!
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For a really fun activity have the young men sign into their Family Tree account and go to the "Activities" link. On this page they will find many exciting activities they can do in the short period of time you have been given and other activites they can do at home.
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As a Family History major at BYUI, I recently worked a group project with a similar scenario. These kids really are not interested in genealogy so you have to make it fun.
First we started with entertaining headstones. We included the ever popular one "I told you I was sick". (That introduced them to Find a Grave, etc.)
We talked about GPS (Genealogical Proof of Standard.) Enforcing that there is a right way to do genealogy.
Finally, we played "Where's Waldo" on a census record. We were able to teach the kids how to read a census record while trying to locate Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Our group got an "A".
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