Intergenerational Connection

By Penelope Rogal Vincent

What do you think seniors can teach young people that schools don’t?

It is of great value to a family, especially when the family expands, to know about our ancestry. A grandfather or great grandmother usually have a wealth of knowledge regarding family roots and anecdotes. Telling the stories orally works well with youngsters, especially if great uncle Leonard Cohen was a poet and wrote the song “Suzanne”. Perhaps your great grandmother Abigail was an exceptional cook and consistently won blue ribbons at the county fair. Children are enthralled by these short anecdotes and will likely ask you to tell them repeatedly!

Once a young person reaches middle school, you can teach them how to build a family tree including date of birth, marriage date, year of death. He or she will acquire many new words that come from a different field of study. If you use a computer to tabulate and save all the information you have gathered, you can then encourage him\her to share this with his\her cousins.

There are a multitude of things you can do — visit a cemetery, museum, antique store. The possibilities are endless. You might even offer to teach a class on Building a Family Tree!