I've known for a very long time (like, since I was 13... I can pinpoint the moment exactly) that someday in the future I would be neck deep in the history of my family, researching it, discovering the people, and chronicling their lives. I've dabbled in it a little - hearing stories from my mom, and occasionally my grandma, going on vacation to Colorado where my great-great grandfather was a doctor in a mining town, or visiting the cemetery just north of my home where my great-great-great-and-everything-else aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and all sorts of relatives are buried.
I've never really known when this was going to happen. I remember once, I helped my mom in her family research, looking for names of our family who settled on the east coast back in... 1600's? Maybe it was 1700's. Something like that. She discovered Jane of Nanjemy, and I found Elizabeth Jones. It was SO exciting, and I had a wonderful feeling. It was this overwhelming feeling of "right."
But, it only came once. I didn't really go back - just helped her once, and then did temple work for the people we found. I've wanted to do it more, but never really had the time... or felt like it was time. I've always sort of felt there were other, more relevant to here and now things I should be doing.
I took a class on family history about a year ago. Yep, leave it to BYU to have a class devoted 100% to family history, that is completely devoid of anything else related to the study of history. This class isn't a part of the history department. It's religion.
Which basically means that while choosing classes not related to my history major, I chose a class related to my history major.
Anyway, when I took that class, I wondered if it was time to make my family's history a focus in my life. My intuitive answer? Nope. Not yet. I kinda felt like the class, while it presented a lot of useful information that would help me in the future (assuming I could remember it), but it wasn't particularly relevant to my present life.
Well, at least my present life if you were reading this about a year ago.
Flashing forward to the real present.
Today is General Conference. I'm glad - I could use a solid dose of spirituality right now, and there have been a lot of really good talks. One of the talks, by David Bednar, was on family history. He talked about finding our family, and using the church website to get started, and doing temple work for them. It was all pretty interesting.
The mostly interesting part, however, was the feeling I got. It was exactly the same as all those years ago (I think it was about 6 years ago), when I was researching with my mom. It was an overwhelming feeling of "right."
I think it's time to get started.
The best place to start is with what I already know - my own life's history. It's where my story starts, and when I'm writing things I already know, I can learn and figure out what I'm doing. I can also write about my immediate family, and then closely extended family. When I have that chronicled, I can move to great-grandparents, and then farther up, so on and so forth.
But, where do I put all this research? It's gotta be digital so it's searchable, and it's gotta be in a format I can enjoy working with. But, it's also gotta be something I can print out and have a hard copy of.
So, I recently discovered that blogger will publish your blog posts into a book. I love blogging. It just made using the Internet to chronicle life and family history plausible. Hopefully they'll keep offering that service for as long as I'm using it.
Anyway, I'm thinking about starting a new blog where I write my life's stories. It wouldn't be a public blog - I'd have to approve readers first. I'd include stories from my memories, and things from family members. For example, last time I was at home I stayed up until about 2 in the morning (after thinking I was going to bed at about 9) talking to my dad, hearing the history of the computer and the Internet from his own experiences. It was SUPER fascinating! His playing with computers in high school, college where data was transferred with punch cards! Yeah, that one blew my mind. There wasn't a cable or anything. You programmed things into a punch card. I spent the whole time wishing I had a recorder or something to get all those memories down, so I could write it all out into a permanent form. Maybe I can get him to email me the story or something.
Anyway, stories like that are bits and pieces of the history of our world, from the lens of actual people who are living in this world. I want to write them down. Then I want to research other family members, and hopefully find their stories. I want to keep going back and back and back until I find as many stories from as many different time periods as I can.
Now... where to begin...
Hm... is that where you are today while you're not answering my texts? :o) Anyway, don't get too comfortable. We're almost through with all of those family names we researched back then. We need to do it again! Clear back to Jamestown. :o)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's a computer story for your compilation that's I've told you before: My dad worked for Mattel Toy Company. He was in the payroll department and programmed the first actual computer of that company... with punch cards. Each pay day required a new giant stack of punch cards to produce everyone's paychecks... however, the accountants STILL recorded everything in books, endless papers that were filed in file cabinets. One day, I met him at work and he showed me the computer. It had the processing capacity of something far less than your current cell phone, but the machines to run that little bit of information filled most of a building. There were flashing lights that seemed fascinating to me. Honestly, to look at it and stand in that room, I felt as though I had stepped into the future of a science fiction movie. At the push of a button, the machine would spit out an entire pile of punch cards, and a printout, stating the information that had been put in place began spewing from an archaic printer. It was pretty amazing. All of this saved a substantial amount of time because the sole purpose was to print out the companies pay checks. It didn't store any huge amount of information, but each pay day (once a month) it faithfully printed the checks without requiring several people to write them out and sign them. The mammoth computer which accomplished this task was made by IBM, which was pretty much the only company that made computers back then... certainly the only company I had ever heard of. Not only that, it was the only computer I EVER saw until the 1980's when they began offering computer classes in college. You just never saw computers before then... at least the common person didn't. We got our first home computer in 1992, when Barry was 2 years old. It was AMAZING! One computer... for the whole family... and we were a rare family to have one! My, how things have changed.
Here's another one. This is a story my mom told me. During WWII, there were very many shortages. People made all sorts of sacrifices, doing rubber drives and steel drives and other things, giving those items to the government so they could make planes and supplies for the ward. As a result, things became pretty scarce... things like tires for cars. We feel it's so important to keep our cars in top condition, at least the minimum of proper maintenance, but back then just to have a car was a pretty big deal. To have gas to put into it was another big deal. There were no such things as seat belts and there were still cars on the road that had lamps on them instead of modern headlights. Anyway, during the war, the rationing became so intense that a lot of people that Nana knew couldn't get tires for their cars. As their old tires wore out and, literally, fell to pieces, they took them off and drove on the steel rims where ever they needed to go. Steel rims! Can you imagine what would happen if they needed to stop fast? Of course, speeds were a lot slower back then and people drove a lot less than they do now, so there weren't as many crowded roads. She told a story once of riding in the back "rumble seat" of a "modern" car. This seat would fold closed, making the back of the car look like a smooth roadster. At the action of moving a latch and lever, the back would pop up and the rumble seat would be exposed. The cars were usually convertibles. Anyway, she was riding with some friends in the rumble seat when they were in an accident and classically "ejected" from the car. Here's a youtube video of a similar car.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37P979OAT58
Times have definitely changed. :o)
And just one more for the day. My late friend, Lorene, was in her 80's when she took me to Gold Road, pointed to a bluff near the Crooked River and told me this story.
ReplyDeleteWhen she was a very young girl, she knew a man, a neighbor of theirs, who was 105 years old. He lived in a house on an old Indian Mound (which is no longer there due to highway 116) near to the recently named "Gold Road".
As a side note of recent history... When 911 was instituted in the area, in the 1990's, they named all the country roads and gave the people houses number... so that the fire department and ambulances would be able to find them more easily. Before then they were just known as rural routes with the post office.
Anyway, this old, old man, lived about half a mile to the west of Gold Road, where it crosses the Crooked River. When he was a young boy, his family heard a lot of commotion one day, horses, shouting and gunshots. They looked out to where it was coming from, and saw what we now call the "Battle of Crooked River" take place. The exact site has been lost to church history, but this man saw it, and when he was 105, he showed it to Lorene... and when she was 80 she showed it to me... and then I showed it to you. Pretty cool, if you stop to think about it. We're privy to lost history by a span of only a couple generations.. :o) Gold Road was part of the old Mormon Trail. It jogged onto present day Ore Road going north to Z Hwy and Texas Road... past the Charles C Rich farm, then to Duroc Road, and then turning right through Mirable, where it finally joined onto D Hwy and went up to Far West and Shoal Creek. Most of the "Trail" is still unpaved, parts of it don't even have the luxury of gravel to firm up the dirt after a rain. Back in those days, the horses pulled the wagons right through it. You rarely had to worry about getting stuck in mud. Today however, unless you want a real "old fashioned adventure", you don't drive down the part of it on Texas road after a rain. When it is dry and you are going through the area, it is like stepping back in time though. There is a little old lady who lives on that part of the road, whose last name is Kerns. I think her first name was Lila, or something like that. She is in her 90's (or was, last time I talked to her). She raises beautiful Pearl Guinea Hens that run loose outside her house, surrounded by the ancient Missouri woods. I've never been able to figure out how she keeps them safe from foxes and coyotes and raccoons, but there they are. Sometimes, I like to imagine what she saw in her younger days, the wagons passing back and forth down that road, followed by Model A's and T's and then larger cars and eventually minivans. :o)
PS... here's a piece of trivia: back in the mid century (1950's & 60's) our average cars got about 8 miles to the gallon. A really great mileage for nearly any car was 12 mpg. If you ever got into trouble on the road, you had to either walk to a gas station (and pay phone) or hope someone could give you a ride to the nearest help. There were no such things as cell phones.
Yay! I'm excited for you to start doing family history! Have fun!
ReplyDeleteHmm... I don't remember where the Battle of Crooked River is. Maybe you can show me again soon, and I'll bring my camera.
ReplyDelete