Review: Your Family Tree: Filling the Family Tree by Jim Ollhoff

Title: Your Family Tree: Filling the Family Tree
Author: Jim Ollhoff
Genre: Juvi, Non Fiction, How To
Perfect for: Grammer school kids (1st through 4th grade) who are looking to start working on their family tree for a school project or for fun!

Taken from ABDO Group, "Interest in family history is a growing passion among people of all ages. Young people want to know where they came from, as well as the people who built their family and their country. Your Family Tree provides easy-to-understand methods for learning about genealogy. This series will help young people organize their own family records, research their history, find sources to learn about the past, and express their genealogical knowledge with family trees and charts, too. Excellent for personal interest reading and for curricular units on immigration."


This book is completely different than any book I've reviewed on here thus far. First, it's aimed at first to fourth graders. Second, it's non fiction. 'Filling the Family Tree' is a great book for middle schoolers looking to do any sort of genealogy work for school or for fun. It is broken up into short, easy to understand chapters with picture-filled pages. Various pages are 'forms' that you can copy or scan to use while you are doing your research.


The main goal of this book is to help students discover facts about their family via interviews. There are chapters on interviewing grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and others. These chapters include a scanner friendly list of questions you'll want to ask, tips on how to document answers and evidence (photo's, ID's, etc), and the general how to's of interviewing.


'Filling the Family Tree' also has some pretty handy graphics that show you how to create the 'family tree' look and how to categorize it so you don't get confused when you start adding on third or fourth generations.


If you have a student working on a family tree or even want some basic knowledge yourself on what to ask your family members, check this book out! It is sure to be a great resource.