I have the good fortune to have a cousin and a second cousin who recently decided we needed to get together. All of us. So my Lanzillotto relatives will be having an impromptu family reunion in a couple of weeks. And I've offered to bring the genealogy! (plus a side dish and a case of beer) Here are a few of my ideas:
1) Make copies of particularly interesting family records for people to peruse.
2) Make copies of family photos to display.
3) Encourage others to bring photographs - and documents, if they have them. (I may keep my printer in the car in case anything shows up that demands being copied and/or scanned.)
4) Put together a family tree to display, with advance help from relatives. I'm definitely going to include the generations from my grandparents to their grandparents, but I don't know whether or not the younger generations will be able to fit on something I make by hand. Off the top of my head, my mother's generation is at least 20-25 cousins; my generation is 42 that I can think of, but probably more; the generation after mine is 8 that I know of, but that's because we're only just getting started!
What other ideas are there for involving genealogy in family reunion?
For the family tree, I'm quite fond of descendancy charts rather than the box family tree, because it shows more detail and you can include all generations. It's a little bit harder to learn to read, but once you do, the amount of information you can include makes it well worth it.
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