Engagement: Get to know your extended family

Making a large world smaller 1 family at a time.

Working on your family tree and want to get to know your living relatives better? Here are a few tools you can use to stay in touch with your family: • Facebook - Interact with your family through Facebook. • Pen Pals - A great way for you or your kids to interact with a family member from another country, develop a foreign language, learn about other cultures. • Newsletters - Share updates with the family. Includes recommendations on tools you can use • Surveys - Includes sample fun questions. A great way to get to know the family, discover common interests.

Facebook

One great way to get to know the extended family is to set up a Facebook Group page and invite all of your family members to join. Facebook already provides a rich set of functionality that allows users to share more information about themselves including their immediate family, photos, interests and more. Here you can really get to know your extended family members via the posts, which you can reply to giving you a great way to interact with them. Other Facebook functionality includes: • It gives family members a place to go to post family specific updates and/or photos. • It has a full set of security and privacy features to allow you to control and restrict who gets to see your information, including postings, pictures and family members. • Creating a Facebook group page for the family allows family members to see who else is in the family without everyone needing to become Facebook friends with each other. Members of the group can post updates and photos that only other members in the group can see. • In the event you need help writing something in another language, Facebook already offers the ability to translate over 70 languages.

Pen Pals

This can be a great way to get to know other members of the family. Whether this is for hobbies that you have a shared interest in or if you have family around the globe - learning more about other cultures, countries or developing your language skills. The younger generation in your family could find this very useful for school projects (history, social studies, sociology, etc) as it allows them to go beyond what they read in the history books or can learn in class. In terms of applications to use, Facebook offers the most functionality as it allows users to share their interests, post updates and send private messages to their Facebook friends. A bit more modern version of the historically popular Pen Pals using regular Postal Mail would be to use your e-mail application to become Pen Pals with your cousins. But, if you want to go beyond e- mail and Facebook - here are a few other online tools that provide a lot of functionality: • International Pen Friends: Offers services for groups, including schools. • Pen Pal World: Includes a number of privacy controls. • My Language Exchange: Includes translation software for 29 languages and letter writing tips..

Newsletters

Sending out a monthly or quarterly Newsletter is a great way to keep the family engaged, provide updates on significant family events (births, weddings, reunions) or changes to the family tree. There are a number of ways to provide newsletters and updates ranging from the free (sending out e- mails that you create yourself) to commercially available tools, one of which is Constant Contact. The advantage of the commercially available tools include: • Many professional templates to choose from for your e-mails • Additional functionality, including the ability to create surveys. • The ability to link the newsletter to your website or FaceBook group allowing more people to see it. You can also add a link there to allow more family members to subscribe to your mailing list as they find your web site or Facebook group. The key is to find common interests or Hobbies, including some popular areas such as: • Fitness (Running, Soccer, Baseball) • Travel, including tips for visiting where the family came from • Outdoor activities (Hiking,Skiing, swimming) • Fund raising & Charities • Cooking, reading, theater and many other topics.

Surveys

Surveys can be a great way for the family to get to know each other. Make them fun so that people will be more likely to fill them in. These can be a great ice breaker and before you know it, family members who never knew each other before can find common interests with other cousins. There are a number of tools that allow you to send surveys out electronically, one of which is Constant Contact. These can be coupled with newsletters that you send out to the family as well. Posting the resutls of the survey in Facebook is a great idea. Do it in a such a way to encourage family members to add comments to your post. It gives your family a chance to interact with each other in a fun way as you share the results. Below are a few survey question ideas that can help you get started. Choose a few from each category. Keep them short so that it doesn’t take a long time to fill out. Keep them fun so your cousins enjoy doing them and look forward to seeing the results.