Our wonderful stake president set a goal for our stake this year for "the Next Generation." So if you've done the four generation program a few years ago, do one more, and if you haven't done any, then start, and if you're stuck, help someone else.

So about a month ago, the high priests in my ward asked me to put together a workshop to get people started. I went to the Grand Old Lady of the area and asked for ideas. She said, "No one will come." So I went to talk to two of my beloved sons and they said, "Let's make it Fun! We'll play games!" That night they came up with a rough outline of HistoryWood Squares and a scavenger hunt. It's been a bit of work putting together the game questions, and a hint list for the scavenger hunt. My personal goal for the evening was to show people that it's a lot easier to research now; there's a Vast Amount of information on the internet - much of it free - and many, many records have been indexed, so someone else has already tried to read the old handwriting, and you can search by name with these indexes.

We started off with a mixer while people gathered and if I had to do this over again, I would use the scavenger hunt as that mixer and let people find things in the displays and in the Family History Center open there in the building. As it was, I think those things were neglected with all the other stuff going on.

Then we moved people into HistoryWood Squares -- with a panel of brethren chosen for their clowning potential. We didn't get two of the ward funny men; our bishop and another guy went to their children's graduations at BYU and missed this. Go figure.

We chose questions for their humor potential: What is dead fred? (www.deadfred.com) and What is a cousin twice removed? and If your ancestor was a Higgler, what did he do? To encourage funniness,  I printed  Extra Points for Extra Funny and  Big Points for Big Laughs and put these on four cardboard fans I had. Then gave them to the audience to wave when they liked something. And I had a sister keeping score for both teams and the panelists.

The good brother ultimately in charge of this did not like my idea of dividing people up and sending groups into the Family History Center for their scavenger hunt. His plan was to have four laptops with projectors and wireless connections showing four teams what could be found for the scavenger hunt items - find a farmer, find a WWII vet, etc. You don't need two guesses to know what happened to that -- failure was almost a certainty. The building router crashed, but when the tech guys found the problem and got it all going again, people busily got to hunting. Even when we walked around saying time's up - I did this twice, and a brother did it another time, they were intently searching. For the fourth try at breaking up the fun so we could send people home, that brother went around telling them that the other groups were going after pie now.

If I were doing it over again, I would end the evening with one person doing an internet demonstration -- that could be fun and funny, too, and there's less chance of one setup crashing, or so I think.

You will note that we did not call this a workshop -- Grand Old Lady's warning prevailed, so the event became a Fun Festival. We got about fifty people, so could have been worse, could have been better.

One thing I did that pleased me was a series of seven posters for the display area, one per famous person. On each poster I put the household view for the 1880 census - 1881 British for Winston Churchill - with other records, trying to show that there's a lot of information out there. And I learned some stuff -- from Alexander Graham Bell's obituary I learned that for one minute at the time his funeral was to start, all the US and Canadian phones were silenced out of respect for him.