Ideas for YSA family history activities while social distancing?
Hello! Can anyone help me figure out some activities my YSA ward could do together while still social distancing? Our bishopric wants to do something physically together—like a scavenger hunt at the cemetery—but some of us are still concerned about getting together. Our home evening activities usually range from 20-35 people. Any suggestions?
답변들
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Unfortunately, I think the leadership might frown on an in-person activity. But why not a virtual scavenger hunt?
Does your ward have a FB page? Use that to encourage people to share as they find items listed in a scavenger hunt, even take pics and include them.
You're list could include things they find on Family Search, or items they possess that belonged to an ancestor, or even physical traits they inherited from an ancestor. Your scavenger hunt list could even be done in the form of a bingo card, and those who complete a line get a prize, with a bigger prize for anyone who completes the whole card. The card could include a few free spaces in which they could fill in an interesting fact about an ancestor.
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Also they could look for things like a photo of a place an ancestor was married, say 200 or more years ago; facts about an ancestor's war experience (say he served in the civil war; what regiment, what battles did that regiment fight in, then research one of the battle), people from one side of your family who are related to the other side of the family, etc. A little more digging and research could compensate for not running around physically.
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Our ward just finished a social distancing indexing challenge. In our ward, the youth challenged the adults; the goal for the ward was to do 1,000 records all together in a week. We had a good amount of participation and were able to meet our goal and more. You could adjust it for your YSA ward by having the Relief Society invite the the Elders Quorum to see how many records your group can do in a week. People who want to get together to index can and those who want to socially distance can and still participate.
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An Indexing 'scavenger hunt' perhaps? Divide your YSA group up into virtual teams, have each team select (or be assigned) an indexing record group, have them index that, then report back on number of persons indexed, what type of records were indexed, what part of the world, share any interesting things discovered. Then on a world map that you manage, highlight or color in every part of the world indexed. Email that map after 30 days so everyone can see what she or he did. However you approach it, indexing is the life blood of research and temple work.
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I trained the stake President and all the ward bishops in our stake on Billion Graves using Zoom. The process of transcribing headstones is a pre-cursor to indexing (which is often difficult for some of the youth because the batches are large, complex, or written in cursive writing which many cannot decipher). Transcribing can be done 1 at a time, or several; there are no batches. If the headstone is difficult to view (poor photographing), the transcriber can use the arrow to go to the next photograph. The other part of involvement with Billion Graves is the youth like to use their cell phones which allows them to photograph headstones. Those without cell phones can participate by using the cleaning equipment through Billion Graves that restores headstones to almost new. With small groups of 4 or 5 the youth can divide parts of the cemetery and take care of a section in 1-2 hours or less. You can get your JustServe.org representative to make sure the counties in your stake are uploaded to cover all the cemeteries.
The app is free so this can be downloaded to cell phones, and to laptops (recommended for transcribing).
Since doing this, we have had more participating in transcribing headstones that were not already indexing. We have had youth with their parents and grandparents go to cemeteries to take photos. This lead to walking through the cemeteries looking for family names or unusual headstones.
Our president of the youth for our stake has scheduled a meeting for his ward and we are having training completed by using Zoom.
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