 Okay, we are ready for our 11 a.m. session here at Big Talk from Small Libraries. I am Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. We run this online conference with our co-sponsors, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. And next up, we have Karen Milliken, who is from the Tipton County Public Library in Indiana. Dig into your history. This is a great session that I read about this online somewhere, I think it's a very interesting program we got going there for a genealogy type program. So I'll just hand over to you, Karen, to explain a little bit more about yourself and what you got going there at your library. Okay, my name is Karen Milliken, and I have to apologize. I have a little bit of an echo because I'm in our meeting room. That's about the little place I can do this in. I said it probably, actually it sounds pretty good. I can tell there's a little bit of echo, but you're very clear, so it's not a big problem, yeah. I am the, first of all, we are a small library, our population is just 18,000. We're a county-wide library here in Indiana, very rural. I am the branch manager of our small windfall branch, and also I do collection management. But I started my career here at Tipton as the Children's Department, Youth Services Department head. So this was a program that I put together when I was the Youth Services Department head, and I did this in connection with our summer reading program, which I'll explain a little bit more to you. And so, let me talk a little bit about how I got into this. I got interested in my own family's history when I was in high school, and we did a school project and we were supposed to look at our family history, and I had a great aunt who was very much a genealogist, and she told me some stories, one of which was that we are descended from pirates. My maiden name is Callis, and this, John Callis was, I don't know how many great-great-greats back, but he was an English pirate, and then in the 1650s there was a pirate by the name of Captain Robert Callis that sailed out of Barbados, and he became a privateer and was awarded land then in Virginia, which was my first ancestor here in the United States, in America. So I thought that was kind of a neat history, so I started looking into my family history some more, and I discovered this is my great-great-grandfather. His name was John Vinton Callis, and he was murdered, and the murder was never solved. And this happened in 1899, and as someone who is an avid mystery reader, that was very intriguing to me. It also started an interest of mine in trying to write a novel about this, but that has never come to fruition, but anyway. So then, that was just my father's father's side of the family, so I was kind of like what's going on on other sides of my family, and I became interested in my family's past and found out a lot of things, which I think anybody who goes down this road, you always find something interesting. So then, as I got older, I was thinking about how, being a good librarian, then I am, how do I take this interest and extend it to a program at the library? How can I use this, especially with children, being the children's librarian, and create something at the library? So in 2013, the summer reading program was Dig into Reading, and light bulb, I decided, hey, we're going to dig into your history. So I named my program Dig into Your History, and started writing up how I wanted the program to go, and my goals. My first goal for this program was to help children get a sense of who they are through finding out where they come from. Some of the questions you can ask, you find out, who am I? Where did I come from? Am I English, German, French? From wherever. Native American. And then, luckily now, thanks to some of the databases, what do my ancestors look like? How can I find out? How can I find these things out? So as I started to put this program together and think about it, we're lucky enough to have a county foundation, and they offer grants. So I started to work on, again, the parameters in keeping in mind that I was going to be applying for a grant, probably more than one, to accomplish this. So one of the things that they ask is who are you targeting? How are you going to get them interested? So the next thing is how to get the kids interested. And at the time, the program, who do you think you are? And it has continued on, I know, but a lot of people are talking about that. So I sent some flyers through the schools to see about getting interested in it, are you related to someone famous? Or one of the most infamous people from Indiana, are you related to someone infamous, is John Dillinger, who actually came through this area quite a bit, going from Chicago escaping from the police. There are a lot of stories about him around here, stopping and hanging out at various hotels and things like that. So kind of got a feel of who would be interested in the program and how much interest I'd have. And then I looked at my community partners. We are, again, very rural, so we have a very strong 4-H community in Tipton County. And they have a genealogy program that I could align my program to and, again, get more kids interested and get more participation by working hand in hand with them. Because going through the course of our program, they could then complete their 4-H project, which I thought was really nice. Also, the other picture here is the Tipton County Foundation. I knew I was going to apply for grants and through that foundation. The one thing that I ended up doing was there is a woman's fund in the foundation, and they actually had a grant that was awarded at the same time that I needed the money for my program. And so I ended up making this a program for girls 10 to 15 for this specific program for the dig into your history, mainly because of timing. I did have boys who had initially were interested, but it was a woman's grant, so I had to narrow that down a little bit. Then we got started, and we had 25 girls who started out in the program, and we purchased scrapbooks for the girls and things like that. The first thing we did was we started off with questionnaires like these. These are personal history questionnaires, life history questionnaires. There are a lot of these online. We questioned the girls to start off with. Do you know how your mom and dad met? Do you know where your grandma and grandpa were born? Do you know how your grandma and grandpa met? What their lives were like when they were young? Because, again, our town is small, our population is small, a lot of the kids were born here in Tipton, from parents who were born here in Tipton, and even grandparents who were born here in Tipton. The background stories were what I was also trying to get them to find out, because I think that's also a very interesting and important thing. I've always felt that if you don't ask those questions about your family, how your life was when you were younger, how did you guys meet, what's going on, then when those people are gone you lose those stories, which kind of make up who you are. That's the journey that culminates in you. We wanted the girls to ask some of those other things. Then, like I said, we supplied each of the girls, like in this picture there's a scrapbook, so we kind of made this a fun thing, not just all about the research and things. We had them take, as you can see, the pictures here that they found, or their families were given by their families, and the research information that they found. We purchased embellishments and gel pens and special craft scissors, so that this could also be a scrapbooking type of project for the girls, so they could create something with the information that they found that they could hang on to and keep. Then later on showed to, hopefully, their children and other people and their families. When we finally started the program, we also gave each of the girls this flyer, which is tools to dig into your history, kind of giving them some places to look. We wanted the girls to do a lot of this on their own to learn how to do this, because, again, we were trying to get them interested in keeping this as a lifelong project or interest. We keep, actually, in our genealogy room, we keep family files on families in Tipton. Again, quite a few of them go way back, which have newspaper articles and things like that in there. We have family books that have been donated to us from families in Tipton County from the beginning. We also have cemetery records, yearbooks. We have a very nice set of yearbooks that every year we get from the schools, and I think that was probably the girls' favorite thing to do was to go into those yearbooks and look at the pictures of their moms and dads and grandma and grandpa when they were in high school and talk about how they were dressed and how the hair was. If you can imagine, these are young girls looking at the 50s and 60s hairdos and things. It was quite interesting. Then we also used, of course, Ancestry.com and FamilySearch, which were you able to go into those members who maybe worked from Tipton County and further back than some of these. I had not used Ancestry.com a whole lot myself because, like I said, I had the great aunt who had researched on one side of my family back to the 1500s. I participated with the girls and created a scrapbook myself. One of the things that I found was my parents' marriage record on Ancestry.com. I printed that out and put that in my scrapbook. I'm going to then share that with my children, my daughters, and talk to my parents because I had never known. I talked to my parents about how they met and what their first date was like, which was very foreign to me. I had never known that, so it was kind of foreign to me. I typed that up and put it in the scrapbook. I did this along with the girls, gathering the same kind of information, going through the same process. This was a big help for them to look at some of these things. We used our computer lab. We would reserve computers for the girls in our computer labs because we only have one computer in our genealogy room that you can actually do searches on as far as, like, Ancestry.com and those things. We reserved the computer lab, which the girls liked because we have, this is the adult computer lab, so they were able to go in there and sit in and do this. Then we helped research other things. Some of the things, as they talked to their families and they found out about where they were from or where they went to college, we encouraged them to look those places up and to get pictures that they could find on the internet for those types of things. Finding out, you know, history. This is also finding out about history, I guess I should say. Now, this is a picture of, this is our genealogy room and this is some instruction the girls are getting on how to use or find a grave. There are quite a few cemeteries here in Tipton County and we did go on some field trips. I'll talk about that in just a minute. But we also, again, have the back wall there that's actually Tipton County family histories. We have some from other states and then even a few from other countries and the girls could use as well as we encourage them to look up. We have several histories written about our county and we encourage the girls to use those to read about how things were generations ago and how the county was formed and to get kind of an understanding about why maybe their families came to Tipton County and lived in, you know, to live in Tipton County and things like that. So we, like I said, we took some field trips and one of the field trips we took was down to Indianapolis, which is a capital city in case you don't know of Indiana. And we went down to the Indiana Historical Society and in 2013, Indiana had a very large flood and Tipton County was flooded out. I'm sure, I don't know, but maybe your town has experienced this, but people were literally in the streets in boats and some of the girls were affected by this. And so, you know, by being moved out of their homes and we actually had to use the library, the meeting room was used as a kind of emergency management spot and people had to stay here and things. So when we went down to the Indiana Historical Society, they have what I call living exhibits and it's called You Are There. And they have actors in the exhibits who are trained to end, you know, about the period they're talking about and it just so happened that in 1913 there was a very large flood and this was called City Under Water and this was like a way station where you would go in if you were flooded out in 1913 and were given rations and blankets and help and could post about, you know, if you were looking for lost family member or whatever. And so the girls, you know, having experienced this in 2013 were able then to see what happened 100 years ago and what they had to do in 1913 without cell phones and Internet and things like that in grocery store, you know, just what the flood was like 100 years ago and it was very interesting because the girls then kind of were like, you know, we were able to just go to, you know, the grocery store and pick up some food and go stay at the hotel and, you know, and things like that whereas they were, you know, shown pictures of, you know, how bad it was and houses destroyed and things like that. So anyway, they also have had, at the time we were at the Historical Society, we were also able to go through a living exhibit of the Eli Lilly and the polio vaccine and them getting that out and things like that. So that was a very interesting thing for the girls to experience and talk to people as if they were there. And again, I think this, the Sydney underwater was extremely educational for them. We then traveled to Crown Health Cemetery to visit some famous graves. John Dillinger, James Wood Camarilly, this is James Wood Camarilly's grave and Benjamin Harrison. And Crown Health Cemetery I think is one of the biggest cemeteries in the nation. And we just did our own little tour of it, but it was to show the girls some of the, again, some of the famous people from Indiana who are buried there. And just to show them, you know, we took them to cemeteries in Tipton County, but this was to just, since we were in Indianapolis, to just kind of see something a little different. This is also, James Wood Camarilly's tomb is also the highest point in Indianapolis, so you can go up there, you drive up and you can go up there and you can see the whole city, which was fun for the girls. But we did, part of what we did, and this is James Wood Camarilly, the girls really enjoyed this little statue of the girl reading. But part of what we did when we visited cemeteries, when they found their, you know, relatives, we would do grave rubbings for their scrapbooks and they could then, you know, notate where the grave was and what cemetery. Because I think sometimes that information is lost, too. I know when we have people come into the library looking for someone's grave, sometimes you just can't find it, even though they've been told, you know, they were buried in such a, such a cemetery. So we also had the girls list, you know, where the, some of the graves were. I know that may sound morbid, but anyway, and we, one of the other things in Crown Hill was there is a tribute to some, some children who are buried in the cemetery that the girls wanted to see. So we did that with them. Interesting thing about Crown Hill is that it is, this is a statue of a little girl that was commissioned by her mother and was made from a photograph that is supposed to be looking exactly like the little girl. But this is supposed to, this statue, this grave is supposed to be haunted. The little girl has been seen weeping. So that was kind of one of another fun thing we did with the girls was we were in, we were in daylight so they didn't really get scared or anything, but we did do some haunted tour stuff because Crown Hill Cemetery is supposed to be extremely haunted. And that just was an extra fun thing for the girls to see some of those, those things. And then after we had gathered all the information and had, were finished and summer reading was over, we had a high T for the girls. And for them to bring significant women in their lives, be it mother, grandmother, aunt, older sister, to come to the T and then we talked to, we had the girls talk, tell the group what they found to be the girls. The most interesting thing that they did and interesting information that they found out about their families. One little girl, I know, we went back several generations and it was, to me it was just amazing because we were able to find pictures of her great-grandmother and back and looking back at the different hairstyles. So she kind of did in her scrapbook, she did like hairstyles of the women or something of the ages. And she thought that was really interesting. I can't remember if anything, but so then they were able to talk to their, their mothers and let them know what they found out and show them their scrapbooks and the information that they found. And so that was in 2013. Now this year is Indiana's bicentennial, so we are going to revamp this program, open it up to boys and go ahead and do a larger program this year. Because it being the bicentennial, we are not going to be doing the national summer reading program, we're going to follow the bicentennial and it kind of just goes along with our theme of, you know, celebrating Indiana's history and then opening up to kids, boys and girls this year. I'm glad you mentioned that because someone actually had asked earlier if you ever thought of doing this for the boys as well. Yes, yes. And we had thought about that. Unfortunately, like I said, you know, and I don't want to be sexist, but the only reason we didn't have boys the first time was the type of brand we got. That's what I was wondering about is why it was specific to the girls, yeah. Yeah, the grant, the grant was through the women's fund and it was awarded, that grant was awarded in May and other grants from the foundation weren't awarded till July and by then our reading program would have been halfway over. So the summer reading, yeah, that's a little late for that. So that was a little late. So we went this direction for the first program and it actually paid out. I think it was beneficial because we didn't have as large a group as I think we will this year. So our first try at this, we had a smaller group and we're able to iron out some of the kinks, so to speak. And this year too because of the popularity of the program and the success that we're going to go ahead and fund it ourselves. So we can tweak and add and do things like that. How many girls did you have in the first run then? We had 25 girls but like so many things that happened because this was a summer long so it ran for three months. So we started out with 25, by the end of it we had 10 that came on a regular basis. Because I don't know how everybody else is but for us we always end up competing with vacations and sports. Summer is hard, yes, yes. But the 10 that came, I always feel like if I touch just one, if I influence one that's good. So the 10 that came on a regular basis, I think they really got something out of it. Oh, definitely, yes. And if nothing else, that's a pretty good spread, right? The food. They had a nice party at the end. When we do it this year we will probably expand it a little bit too as far as field trips, if at all possible, to visit some other places that we didn't get to when we went down to Indianapolis. I'd like to take Indiana, the Indiana State Library of course has a very large genealogy resource and as well as the historical society. But there are a couple other places I'd like to take them, especially this being the bicentennial kind of situation. But again, I think for me I met my personal goal which was to kind of instill an interest in finding out about your past with the girls and finding out those stories that you just need to hang on to and somehow write down before that person is no longer there to tell you that story. So, you know, I feel like it was a success. Anyway, but that's what I did. I think if you want to embark on a program like this, your first step, which I did, which is really take a look and find out what your resources are that you can use to help the kids. We're lucky. We have a very nice genealogy room. The community has really donated a lot. And then going through 4-H and going through our foundation, I was able to get a lot of community support. Oh, I thought somebody said something. Sorry. I was able to get a lot of community support. We had some really nice write-ups in the newspaper and things like that. So, again, it was enough of a success that we're going to do it again and expand it. Does anybody have any questions? Were there any questions? Yes, we do have some that have come in. Let's see here. Actually, going back to, you had a list of questions. There's two sheets, I think they're on the screen of a whole bunch of questions you had to go. Just some requests. Is that something that we can get a copy of to use for their own presentation, for their own programs to do this, or are they available somewhere? Nobody could dizzy. Let's go back. Let me go. Sorry. They're just small on the screen. You can actually... Yeah, those. Yes, I will say this though. Most of the ones that I found, I got off of Pinterest. That is also a good resource. And then we kind of just personalized, not personalized, but created our own using various ones that we found. And then I also included some of the questions that were from the 4-H genealogy handbook that they, one of the kids to ask so that those were included so they could use them for their project. But yes, I can absolutely, and I don't know if on this, can I do that through the big talk? Sure, yeah. If you want to email me if they're like just Word documents or whatever PDFs they are, I can include them when I put up the recording for your particular session. Okay, I can do that. Yeah, you send them to me. They can go up when also your slides and everything. We can have these pulled out separately so everybody can have access to that. Okay. Not a problem. Perfect. All right. Great. Let's see. Questions we have here. A couple of people want to know about the field trips. How did you do permission slips for that to get the permission for the kids to go on those? We, right at the beginning when we again sat down and talked to the girls and talked about things, we got parent permission slips signed for photographs and for field trips because we knew we were going to be taking pictures of as we progressed and what we were doing. And we then, we have a library van and then we used IDROV as my van in order to get everybody down there. But we did get parent permission slips right off the bat. We informed them that we were going to be going to outside of the library to the cemeteries and then down to Indianapolis. All right. And we did leave information with staff member here. We gave parents the staff member here's name to call into the library who then could get in touch with us if need be. I think every girl had a cell phone with her. Most likely, yes. But you still needed the permission. What ages were the girls, someone said they stepped away. Can you say again what age range the girls were that participated in the program? 10 to 15, but I think most of them were in the 11-12 range. Yeah, that seemed to be, we didn't have any younger girls, so that wasn't a problem. And I don't think anybody was 15, but that's who we had set the parameters for. Who was open and available to? Yeah. Right. For the meetings that you had in those three months, how often did you meet and how long were the, as opposed to the field trips were different, but the regular meetings, how long did you meet? We met twice a week for an hour and a half. That way, and the reason we did that again is because it's summer, so we set that up. It was Tuesday, Thursday, so if you missed Tuesday, you had Thursday to come in, and mainly the sessions were to go over with them, what they had found, helping them type up. They'd go and ask the questions, they'd write down the answers, or their grandparent would write down the answer, and then to make it nice for the scrapbook, we helped them type it up and do the embellishments. So it wasn't like if you missed Tuesday, you were behind. But we did have it twice a week so that there was some flexibility there, knowing full well that we were up against a lot of things. Of course. Right. Summer's busy, yeah. Summer's busy, and everybody goes on a vacation. So for each week or session, did you have a theme or a specific activity to be doing, or was it more unstructured research time, or ahead of time, did they know what they might be doing? Right. We did a couple, what I would call more structured, and we gave them at least a week's notice in advance of when we were going to be going out to the cemetery or whatever. The big field trip was a little bit more notice, but there was one session where we did specifically pull out the yearbooks to help them find their parents, grandparents in the index, teaching them how to use the index in the back of a book to look up somebody's name, and there's the pages that they're on, and they're going to be in pictures and these, you know. And another time we did spend in the computer lab with specifically showing them how you go about using, like, Ancestry.com. And sometimes, you know, I don't know how familiar you are with that, but sometimes your name, like, my maiden name, as you saw on that slide, it used to be C-A-L-L-E-S. Then it was changed to C-A-L-L-I-S somewhere along the line. So you have to sometimes, you know, figure, especially when you have immigrants coming, that sometimes the spelling gets changed. Makes it much harder to track down. It's harder. And so we did kind of, you know, they're young, but we were, you know, trying to give them some of that information and help them do that information. So we would have specific, you know, specific times that, well, this week we're going to get on the computers again and see what we can find. So we did do that. All right. So going back to specifically talking about the grant, what specifically was the grant money used for? Okay. We got $1,000 and it was used to mainly, hello? Yep, we're here. Oh, okay. Because you disappeared off my screen. Oh, sorry. Anyway, it was, the grant money was used to buy the supplies, the scrapbooks, and like I said, we bought, you know, some of those things. And then to pay for the gas to go down and we bought the girls' lunch down in Indianapolis. And let me tell you, because that's not my thing right here. The genealogy supplies the field trip and then the tea. And, you know, so that wasn't too bad. Those scrapbooks are probably what was the most expensive part of it. All the supplies for that, yeah. Yeah, but again, because, you know, we bought scrapbooks and paper and stickers and, you know, but that I think too was fun for the kids. You want this to, you know, interesting but also fun. And they had a blast decorating them. Oh, yeah. So, you know, that was important. Were any of the field trips and overnights or was it just day trips? Well, just day trips. All of them were with the distance of day trips. Yeah, just day trips. We're about 45 minutes from downtown Indianapolis, maybe an hour, depending. And so, you know, we're able to get down there and get back within the day. Nice. Yeah, yeah. And the girls, again, I think after we went to the Crown Hill Cemetery, one of the girls actually went back with her family to do a more extensive tour of it. Because it is, I mean, not that cemeteries are nice, but it's really a nice cemetery. And so, you know, she was able, you know, then to take her family down to Indianapolis to Crown Hill Cemetery. And they did a tour of the cemetery. And, you know, so at least I know I interested her in something. Right. Yeah, nice. So that was nice to show them that. And I don't know if anybody in Letterboxes, I don't know if you know what that is, but there are a ton of Letterboxes at cemeteries. And Crown Hill has a ton of Letterboxes. So, you know, that could be a whole nother program right there. Right. To get the girls interested. That kind of relates to one of the questions we had. You said she took her family to the cemetery again. Did they do how much work on their own at home on these? Well, quite a bit because they had to do the questionnaires. True. And they took their books home with them. They had to ask other relatives to get more information about their family and everything, of course. And they took the, they took their scrapbooks home with them after every meeting and, you know, to work on at home if they wanted to, you know. And, but mainly what they did was to do the questions. You know, because it would, some of the girls, it would require telephone calls and things like that. So, and we told, we did that. We did try, you know, you have to be a little bit sensitive because not everybody's family is consistent of, consisting of mom, married to dad, you know, and grandma and grandpa. You know what I mean? So. Okay, that's good that you mentioned that because that was one of the questions. The next question I was asked is someone wanted to know how would you handle this with girls from non-traditional families, single-parent, raised by their grandparents instead? Yeah. So you did have some people in that, some of the kids were in that situation? Yes, we did. Yes. So we had to, you know, you have to be a little bit sensitive about that. And actually one of the girls that came who was a special, she was, she was, no, she is special needs. And her home life was not really good. Her home life is not good. She had asked me if she could talk, if she could ask these questions of a woman who is her friend and has helped her. And of course, the answer is yes. Because you, you know, you have to be, again, you have to be sensitive to that. You have to, you want them to enjoy this and to learn. And if that woman was the person that she felt closest to and felt like had the most influence in her life, then by all means, that's her family. So, you know, you just, and if, you know, we would say, well, you know, if you don't, you know, if you don't have a grandma or grandpa, then, you know, maybe ask aunt's uncles, you know, whoever. But yeah, we did have, you did have to be a little, you have to be a little sensitive to that. And not make a big deal out of, you know, to not make a big deal out of any one thing about family. And that, like, you know, we wouldn't talk about, well, your dad, your dad, your dad, because maybe there's not a dad. Right. So, you know, you have to just kind of be careful how you say and what you say and help them figure out how they can get some of this information. You know, one little girl, her grandfather, was a sheriff in town and he had died. And so, you know, it was interesting for her to go back and see. And that had happened before she was born. So she went back and was able to find information on him in our newspaper files that people had written like an editorial or something like that about when he had died. And, you know, nice said, nice things about him, you know, that kind of stuff. So, yeah, we had to work through some of that. Right. Of course. I think we're getting close to the end of the time. But I just have two other comment and question that came out from people, which is interesting because they're related, but from totally different sides. Someone says this is an appealing program because in their library, their genealogy society is all from the much older end of the continuum rather than from the younger side. Right. And I think that is sometimes common. But then someone else asked, is do you feel that this could be a successful program for adults? Actually, yes. Again, I have a huge interest that started when I was young in learning about my family. So, I think that, you know, it's appealing to kids because, you know, these girls were like cracking up when they saw the pictures of their parents. I mean, who doesn't think that's funny, right? So it appeals to the kids on one end of the spectrum. You know, the funny pictures of the parents when they were older and, you know, grandma would have to, you know, eat large sandwiches at lunch. And she, you know, I mean, just strange things, right? But yeah, I think it would appeal to adults because you're on the other spectrum coming from the maturity of, you know, maybe, you know, finding out, again, some of those interesting stories. That's the thing. I hate to keep going back to that, but I don't know if anybody's familiar with StoryCorps, but I just think that that's an amazing thing. Getting those stories down that will disappear. And so, you know, as an adult, getting adults interested in these programs, it may not be getting the stories from, you know, hopefully from their parents and whoever they can, but maybe also writing their stories down for their children and grandchildren and finding out some of this information that then they can, again, pass down, you know, and have done the research for younger generations. I don't know. I think it, I think it could be. I enjoyed the scrapbooking, by the way. Yes, the crafty stuff, and yeah, if you're into crafting, that's definitely an attack and something to be attractive. Cool. All right. That actually is, like I said, we're getting close to the end. They're a little over a bit, but that's okay. Grab as many of the questions as we could. Thank you very, very much, Karen. That was very interesting. This is one of the topics I was really interested in hearing about and seeing how you'd done this great program with the genealogy of girls. Okay. Yeah, very interesting. Sure. And you have my email. If anybody has any questions, they can email me or call me, and hopefully I'll be able to help you out, and I'll get you the PDF for my questions. Yes, yeah, definitely. Send those along when you send in the slides, and we'll put them up all together on the recordings afterwards, so everybody will have access to those and be able to read them. All right. Thank you for the opportunity. Great. Thank you very much, Karen.