By now, I hope you have collected basic information on your parents, grandparents, and hopefully a few great-grandparents. Write down as many family stories as you can. You know, the story of how Grandma had the chore of running water, when running water meant her, as a little girl running down the stream and walking back with a bucket of water. Or how Grandad as a student helped relocate the privy to on top of the high school roof. The World War II scrap metal drives and ration coupons. The yellow dye sold separate from the oleomargarine to mix together to make it look like real butter because real butter went to the troops overseas. The good times and bad times are what create real people. You will never understand why Grandma never threw usable things out, unless you realize that she grew up in the 1930 depression when jobs and heating coal were precious. FIRST RULE OF WRITING: Just write down fast, ignore spelling and grammar, just get down on paper as you heard it around the dinner table. You are saving memories, not Pulitzer Prize material. Hopefully, you have scribbled some places where they lived as the family progressed across the country. Why the places they lived, not just the birth and death place, you ask. Places will help us later as we look for the fun documents.
Now is the time to explore how you want to store all this information. We are back to testing the original goal that you wrote down in WEEK ONE. Was your goal to make a coffee table book to show the grandkids where they came from? In that case, a scrapbook with pictures, stories and family group sheets is all you need. If your goal is to make sure none of this is lost in a shoebox thrown out after the estate sale, we need a more structured approach. Not everyone needs to invest big money. If you are only going to make a four or five generation direct ancestor tree, I would suggest a look at FAMILYSEARCH.ORG as a permanent storage of your tree. It is FREE to use, they have billions of records collected from around the world. The site offers a way to store pictures associated with your ancestors. They have online research training, census records, church records, and listings of resources for each country and county you are looking at. Next week we will explore subscription services like ANCESTRY.COM.
Ed Peck can be reached through this newspaper and also the White River Museum on Park Ave. He’s available for guidance at no cost. Contributions to the museum are encouraged.
By Ed Peck
Special to the Herald Times
