Have you ever made a family history? I want to make a book of memories for my father to give at our second ever family reunion.

Does anybody have any good ideas for gathering stories to make a book of memories to give out to people who attend a family reunion?  My dad is 78, and next year in September, we are getting our family together. 

I've thought about making a kind of email to send around and have people write some experience  they have had with my family and particularly my dad over the years.  What do you think?  Any other ideas?

Has anybody had experience with getting a project like this off the ground?  I live in Japan, and everybody else lives the USA, so contacting older people who may not have computer skills might be tricky.  And, telephoning people is not a viable way of contacting people either.

I appreciate any input on this.

oh I made a memory cd for my husband when he came back from the army; he did 1 yr of military service and i made a cute cd wt power point presentation from the day we met until he came home....

i want to do something similar now. he's on a business trip and will be back home on Oct 24, that's just some days b4 our 2nd wedding anniv. So again I want to do a presentation wt photos and text from the day we met until he comes home...

I wanted to do a family history thingy but i was left stuck at around 1910s when my grand-grandma was born. apparently some papers were lost from that period...

start by doing your family "tree" (ask around, at least 2-3 generations it's simple to add); then ask around what the members did for a living. wt some luck they might have had some important role in the society (i've got a grand grand father who has a mayor!) ...then start looking for photos and newspaper articles.

you might want to make a collage like a newspaper and print it somewhere...then mail it to ppl or give it on the day of the event.

Not sure if this will help or not but my mother gave me a keepsake journal called My Childhood Memories by Thomas Kinkade. The book outlines everything from the when she was very young all the way until adult hood. There are pictures of family and her stories throughout her life. Means a lot to me. Any way, my point was that at a good book store like Barnes & Noble they might have something there to make for your dad.

My aunt, grandmother, and some distant great aunt of mine are the genealogical fanatics in my family (our branch of the family is Mormon).  The distant great aunt put together a 300+ page book of all the descendants of my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather...complete with some nifty documents, like a copy of an old property deed in Pennsylvania signed by Benjamin Franklin.

Probably doesn't help you given your circumstances, but there's something to be said about the value of basic genealogical information.