Turn kids into "junior genealogists" with family history activities they can have fun doing. Tombstone rubbings show them how to record and preserve valuable facts about ancestors.

You might not expect to see a group of adolescent boys absorbed in a discussion of pedigree charts, marriage certificates and census records — especially at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. But that's just what happened a few months ago when I helped teach a genealogy merit badge class for a group of local Boy Scouts. Here were 10 teens and pre-teens, eagerly telling me and two other counselors — as well as their peers — about their family history discoveries.