🌳 🗺️ LOCAL & FAMILY HISTORY PROJECTS for Homeschoolers

Summer is a great time of year to explore your local area and get a few educational projects underway that can grow and develop all through the year ahead. We think two project areas are especially valuable for homeschoolers: local history and geography, and your own family history.

If your students become experts on the local history and geography of your town or city it will be easier for them to go on to learn about the history of the whole world, because the whole world is just a collection of local regions. Here are some tools and activities that will help your students develop the skills and knowledge they need.

• ➢ USGS Topographic Maps (mytopo.com) — The first tool you need if you’re going to start learning about your local area with your students is a detailed professional paper map. For at least a century, the standard maps for the United States have been the U.S. Geological Survey topographic series, typically available at a 1:24,000 scale. Yes, there are digital maps available online, but the educational value of a great big sheet of paper far surpasses all the digital alternatives. Browse the MyTopo.com store for the quadrangle(s) that include your town or city and order them as permanent reference tools for your homeschool. (Follow either the US Topo Maps link or the Classic USGS Quads link.) These maps are typically 24 ⨉ 28 inches in size and are shipped rolled. Here’s a sample map from an area I lived in many years ago so you can see what they look like. Spend lots of time, indoors and out, going over the map with your students, orienting it to the landscape as you travel around your area, and identifying all the different map symbols and details it includes. (“See that building right there? That’s this rectangle on the map.”)
• ➢ The Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org) — The Historical Marker Database is a giant volunteer-generated collection of historical markers, signs, plaques, monuments, and more, in cities and towns across the United States and around the world. You and your homeschoolers can learn all kinds of interesting historical facts about your local area by looking up the markers and monuments that have already been entered into the HMDB and going to track them all down in person. For a higher level of involvement, you can submit additional photos and documentation for those markers. And for a real independent project, perhaps similar to an Eagle Scout of Gold Award project, see if your students can locate some unrecorded historical markers in your region and create new HMDB records for them, with good photographs and full documentation. It’s a great community-focused educational activity for everyone in your homeschool. (Here’s an example I created myself so you can see what a complete marker record looks like.)
• ➢ The National Map Corps (usgs.gov) — If your students get hooked on exploring with maps (and I hope they will!), you should look into participating in the National Map Corps project. The National Map Corps is a group of volunteer explorers who locate, verify, and update information on the official USGS topographic maps that we listed above. Participants add information about buildings, parks, trails, lakes and ponds, and more — all with the aim of improving the information displayed on these important public maps. Some computer skills are needed to work with the NMC website, skills that students can develop as they go along. As with the HMDB, a summer spent working on National Map Corps projects might be similar to an Eagle Scout or Gold Award project for homeschool teens.

Genealogy (family history) is a wonderful subject to take up in any homeschool. It’s naturally home and family oriented, and it’s an ideal way to help students develop a sense of time, history, and geography. Here are three great resources that can help you get started with genealogy and keep you going all through your homeschooling years.

• ➢ Printable Genealogy Charts — For beginners, we strongly recommend starting out with printable family history charts that your students can fill in directly. We like the ones available from Misbach.org best of all. Some of their charts are fancy and for sale, but they also have many free versions that are more than adequate and have all the features you need. There’s a simple “Kids Chart” that’s great for younger children; the two standard charts that most genealogists use are the ones titled “Pedigree Chart” and “Family Group Record Sheet.” Download and print out a few copies of the charts that appeal to you (they are all pdf files) and begin your homeschool genealogy adventure today.
• ➢ WikiTree (wikitree.com) — If genealogy captures your family’s imagination and you want to connect up with other family historians who may be working on the same ancestral branches that you are your students are working on, create a free account at WikiTree.com and start exploring. WikiTree is a large online genealogical community that will help you discover the history of your family and let you share your own information and connections with other family historians. See how many generations back you can go into history, and then come forward and see how many distant cousins you may have living today that you never knew about. In addition to working with your own personal family history, WikiTree also offers opportunities to contribute to more general projects, like entering as many new records as possible for a particular locality (maybe your home town or county).
• ➢ Find-a-Grave (findagrave.com) — Cemeteries are ideal places to learn about the history of your local area and the history of your family too (if they’ve lived in the area for a few generations). Find-a-Grave is a large online community of genealogists and local historians who document cemeteries across the United States and around the world, adding photographs, transcriptions of gravestones, genealogical links, and more. Look up some of the cemeteries in your area on the Find-a-Grave website, browse them online, and then pay them a visit in person with your students (and with your handy USGS map under your arm). On your visits you can take new photos and add them to the Find-a-Grave collections, and you can enter additional documentary information for any of the persons or cemeteries that are already included. And on your visits, don’t miss the chance to look at the changing styles of commemorative art and design that you may find, especially in older cemeteries.

What educational discoveries will you and your students be making online, at home, or out in the field this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡