What to give someone who has everything
Every December it gets a little harder. You walk the aisles looking for something for your mother, or your father, or the grandparent who says every year, "Please don't get me anything." You come home with a sweater, a candle or a gift card again, and you both know it.
The trouble usually isn't that they're hard to please. It's that they already have everything a store can sell. By the time someone reaches 70 or 80, the house is full, the closets are full, and the things they'd miss most aren't things at all.
What they don't have yet
Ask a parent where their grandparents were born, and many will pause. Ask what town the family left, or which ship they came on, and the answers get thinner. Most families know a few stories and a handful of names, and the rest has slipped away a little more with each generation.
That's the gap a store can't fill. Nobody else can give your parents their own grandparents' names, the town they came from or the record that shows it. Those things exist only for one family, and that's exactly why they make the most personal gift there is.
What makes a gift irreplaceable
Think about the gifts you've kept for years. They're rarely the expensive ones. They're the ones that could only have come from one person, for one person: a letter, a photograph, something handmade.
A family history works the same way. It can't be bought off a shelf because it doesn't exist until someone finds it. It's about people, not things, so it doesn't wear out or go out of style. And it gets handed down. The book you give your father this Christmas is the book his grandchildren will read one day.
A family history, as a gift
At Root & Quill we research a family in the original records, such as parish registers, census pages and passenger lists, and write their story into a hardcover book. Every fact is cited to the record it came from, so the family can trust what they read and check it for themselves.
In our sample book about the fictional Doe family, for example, the reader follows four generations from a Vermont hill farm and three countries, and every name in the family tree points to a record. You can see how those pages look on our Sample Pages.
The books start at $450 for the Ancestor Portrait, the story of one ancestor or couple, and the details are on Books & Pricing.
How giving it works
Research takes time, so the easiest way to give a family history is our printable gift certificate. You give the certificate now, with your own message on it. They begin whenever they're ready, with their own free 30-minute call. You can pay in full, or half now and the rest during their project, and every invoice comes to you, never to them. It covers any of our books, at the same prices and terms as our website.
It also fits in a card, which makes it one of the few meaningful gifts you can still give the week before Christmas.
If you'd like to start smaller
A family history doesn't have to begin with a book. Some of the best gifts cost almost nothing:
an afternoon with a recorder running, asking your parent about the house they grew up in
a box of old photographs, sorted together, with every face named on the back in soft pencil
a copy of the family recipes, in the handwriting they were written in
Our free guide, The Family Story Starter, has 24 questions to ask, ways to keep old photographs safe and a family chart to fill in. And our gift guide for parents who have everything has more ideas at every budget.
A gift that stays
Whatever you give this year, the family's story is worth catching while the people who remember it are here to tell it. Who in your family would love to know where they came from? We'd love to hear about them.
If you'd like to talk about a gift, a free 30-minute call is the easiest place to start. We'll listen to what you know and suggest the book that fits.
