This publication contains 44 suggestions for projects which actively involve elementary and secondary students in an individual quest for a personal heritage within the topical frameworks of community, ethnic, and family history. The projects are intended to awaken students to the realization that history is all around them. The projects utilize the community as a source of learning, assume that the basic motivation for studying the past is essentially personal, emphasize ethnicity, and, for the most part, involve students in out of school research activities. The ideas are general and require the teacher to adjust or adapt them to particular grade levels. Some examples of project suggestions follow. Students research and write their school history. The teacher obtains a set of topographic maps of the county and students begin a process of coding "event cards" to "event numbers" carefully placed in their proper locations on the map. Using a topographic map of the county as a basic reference, students discover the origins of local place names. Students work together as a class to compile a multi-ethnic, multi-generational glossary of community slang. In other activities, students study cemeteries, compile a scrapbook of family history, put together photojournalism essays in county history, and tape old phonograph records. (Author/RM)