Ancestry Classroom

Did you know that when on a computer at school, students and faculty have free access to Ancestry.com? That's right! Completely free access!

That means this can be a great free resource for students for a variety of projects. Now, how could you incorporate this into your classroom?

1. SCIENCE or HEALTH SCIENCE: Use the death data of ancestors. By having students bring in grandparents' data, they can then find information on great-grandparents and their siblings, cousins, etc. Through that generation, they can try to track the information on how their ancestors died. Based on the ages of high school students, this can place their ancestors at points in history during various health crises like the Polio epidemic or the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Another source of information that will also help with this is http://health.utah.gov/genomics/familyhistory/toolkit.html

2. HISTORICAL ANALYSIS: When studying a particular period of history, have students research to learn where their ancestors lived, and what information they can find about those ancestors. Concentrate on female relatives during studies of the women's suffrage movement, or male relatives of draft age during World War I units. Ancestry.com does have links to military records and draft cards although a lot of military data was lost in a fire in the 1970s at the National Archives.

3. ORAL HISTORY: Through research on the site, students could have a basis for developing and asking questions to create a family oral history. They can then develop a family narrative using a variety of websites like ourstory.com or a voicethread.

4. GEOGRAPHY and MATH: Study the movement of people by tracing the movement of ancestors of the entire class over time using census data. This can then lead to statistical analysis of the data.

Even if teachers and students just use the access to the site for genealogical research, it's great to know we have access to ancestry.com at school. Although we've actually had the access county-wide for awhile, it seems that not all schools got the word when it happened so let's get the word out now!