Recipe for a Father's Day Genealogy Project

It's time to turn your genealogy skills into a great gift.

You're the family tree nerd in your family, right? Then you're the best person to whip up a genealogy-based Father's Day gift. (If you can't give a gift to your dad, I'm sure there's a father in your family that you like a lot.)

Time's running out, so let's get to it.

Pull together every genealogy item you've found that includes your dad. These are your main ingredients:

• Birth record
• Census forms
• Yearbook photos
• Marriage documents
• Photos throughout his life
• Highlights of his accomplishments

Blend these ingredients together in a way that helps tell dad's life. I'm going to mix images from the list above into a Microsoft Word document. That way I can write detailed captions for each image. And I can write a few sentences between the images, telling the story of Dad's life.

Who could be better than a genealogist to make the perfect Father's Day gift?

With your ingredients gathered, whip up a timeline of Dad's major life moments. My dad's timeline would go like this. Think about how these types of events might relate to your dad.

• Birth in Ohio (I can't get the document itself.)
• Move from Ohio to New York (He's in the 1940 census in New York as a little boy from Ohio.)
• Grade school graduation (I recently got photos of him with his diploma and his parents.)
• High school graduation (Dad's Cardinal Hayes High School yearbooks are online.)
• Move back to Ohio (I have photos of his family in Cleveland.)
• Joining the U.S. Air Force (My dad was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, which is a big part of his identity.)
• Marrying my mom (I've got images of the Bronx, New York, marriage license index in 1954.)
• His bail-out as his jet plane started to break apart and crash (I have a copy of a newspaper article about his bailout.)
• Vacations with his young family (My brother digitized our old family slides.)
• His long succession of houses (Houses and moving are a big part of our family story.)

With your outline well-mixed:

• Fold in dates and places
• Knead each bullet point into a few sentences
• Sprinkle in photos and document images to taste

I can't give my father a hard-copy of this collection in person. He lives too far away, and I thought of it too late! But if I build it in Word and save it as a PDF, I can email it to him.

Here's how a section of my dad's story is shaping up. It's not a lot of text because I think he'll enjoy the photos more.

Think through Dad's life and its milestones for a wonderful Father's Day gift.

Don't over-cook it. Don't stress out. Just start writing and finding images to use. The words will come to you.

It's a lot more satisfying than a generic Father's Day card, don't you think?