Research Nuggets: Personalizing Middle School Student Family History Research

The emphasis of this learning experience is on student exposure to a variety of resources. Students will understand that using a collection of diverse resources provides richer investigations and more comprehensive research findings. This understanding will be transferrable to their future research opportunities.

What were the Instagram, Facebook pages, and yearbooks of our ancestors? What do primary source documents tell us about their lives?
• Students will reflect on primary sources of information in our 21st century world and use their 19th and 20th century counterparts.
• Students will select a single ancestor from their family tree and write an essential question that they will answer using family history resources.
• Students will become a ‘family history detective’ and find ‘evidence’ to support their essential question about their ancestor.
• They will reflect on the resources they’re exploring and how those resources provide clues about their ancestor’s life.

This is an individual research experience for each student. No two student projects will look the same and no two students will explore the same set of resources. This is true inquiry, where students decide which resources will contain information to support their essential question.