Genealogy Crossword Puzzles and Games

Ali and Lilith come for their annual week on Grandma and Grandpa's farm soon. Since Ali, age 10, is our budding next-generation genealogist and Lilith is interested in ancestor stories, I always like to have a genealogy activity ready for them.

Last year I organized a very successful Ancestor Cemetery Hunt. This year we'll repeat that at a different cemetery but I wanted something more sedentary, something we could work on together but inside.

After hunting around the 'net for Genealogy crossword puzzles or word searches, I gave up and created my own. This is an image of part of the Genealogy Word Search I created. It's pretty easy, just make a list of genealogy related words and start putting them into an Excel page.

Next add letters randomly in the empty squares. In this photo I left the Genealogy words bolded for my answer sheet. In the final Word Search page I printed for the grandchildren, all letters are the same non-bolded look.

The Genealogy Crossword puzzle is not proving as easy to create. It was pretty easy to come up with the puzzle and the clues (definitions). However trying to add the superscript numbers in Excel didn't work for me. Trying to do this in Word also did not work. The image on the left shows my first draft attempt. Some numbers are superscript, some are normal. I could not get them to set to superscript! I would of course resize the boxes to be equal sizes, and black in all the unused squares before printing this off. This was to be my answer sheet, the final Crossword puzzle would have empty squares to be filled in.

I could add the numbers by hand and that is likely what I'll end up doing. Because when all is said and done, I only have so much patience. If anyone knows how I can create nice little superscript numbers, please post details here and save me from tearing my hair out!