ERC Week #9 History and Genealogy

WHST Grades 11-12 - 2,4,5,7,8

Using all of the resources listed would make for a great individual project for students in grades 11-12.  Many students in this age group don't really pay attention to family history.  They are more attuned to things teens are experiencing, so an assignment like this would get them talking to family members too.

This exercise challenges them to research and write about family history.  Using the ancestral charts available for printing, the assignment will be to track their family back as far as they can, and write a report to present to the class on what they found.  The report will include showing the ancestral chart.  Interesting tidbits gleaned from the databases or from interviews with individual family members will hopefully be found and shared.

For the Sanborn Maps part of it, rather than have each student research the same city, I would have them pick a different city.  There are plenty of cities in Sanborn so that even a large class would have little duplication.  I would have them wait to do the Sanborn part until after they have done the family history part.  Maybe in the family research part, they found an ancestor that had ties to DeSmet in the 1800's, so they could look at the two entries for DeSmet from 1893 and 1898, and tell the class about what those maps reveal from those years.