July thru early August has been a very special time for me and my two remaining syblings ( little sister, me, and our older brother). Any way, our little sister had missed the childhood memories we all since the rest of us were so much older than her.

So we tackled that. We never got off that subject because my brother and I couldn't agree on who did what when, or what some of the others did. I always love arguing with him and he with me, but soon my sister told us we were hopeless, but she said it with a big smile! So we tried again the next day to agree a litlle bit more. We covered it all plus old family legends. It might be not totally accurate but she was very happy.

We should have done that a lot sooner. The rest of those weeks was more talking and my brother showing me how to exercise and keep muscle mass. Wonderful ... I was stiff for days.

This sounds wonderful. I have been telling people for years that I feel people should write an autobiography around retirment age and then add to it over time. Even if it is never published (or even seriously edited) it would be an asset to people further down the tree. I wish I could crack open a book and read about some distant, or even not so distant, relative.

Someone in the family wrote my grandmother biography. It's full of small details with no interest to anyone except the family...
I just regret we didn't do the same for my other grandparents, but one always think our life has no real interest to anyone but ourselves, so we never do it...

There is one thing neither my brother nor I could remember and it is a vexing little detail ... who in the family swaped what to get a small travel trailer for us to live in??? It definitely was a swap. A lot of such bartering was common from the smallest thing to shelter. My best guess is that Dad had hired out his skills for it. He only went to second grade but he could do a lot of things ... from a farming background he learned a lot. I had a picture of him when he was 10 y.o. and to look into his eyes there was already a young man. I wonder who took that picture, hmm.

Enough, it doesn't really matter.

I am glad that some of you are thinking of ways to present your younger generations with your family history. They will appreciate.

When our local Waldenbooks bookstore was closed I snapped up 9 digest-sized thesis books with the intention of using them for my life's story - in longhand (to be transcribed onto electronic media at a later time) - each with a general life topic, written as I go with no real agenda outline. More of a written one-sided conversation to my grandchildren (and beyond). They're still sitting there on the bookshelf... something I've gotta get to...

This talk of family histories is quite interesting to me. My wife and I have been looking into our histories for quite some time now. Both of us have sisters who collect things like newspapers clippings and family photos. Just last Friday my sister sent me a photocopy of my grandfather's Birth Certificate and his Marriage Certificate to my grandmother.

One suggestion to anyone who is thinking of doing something like this is to go with a hard copy of any of this stuff. On paper you can see it. It will last for about a hundred years or even more if kept in a dark and dry place, like a photo album or scrapbook. Just in the past few days I read that the CD turned thirty years old. Already kids are making jokes about those funny shiney disks their parents have. What would they think of those voice recordings we made in the seventies? Without the machines to play them on those media files are just curiosities. Just like those flash drives and ipods will be in thirty years. Put everything on paper and back it up with the latest technologies in redundancy. The voice recordings done to cassette, copied to CD, then to flash drive, then to whatever the next generation brings. I also have two cassette decks and two VHS machines in storage. Even have an old reel to reel deck that is sweet. Have lots of old music on reel, but also have a dozen or so Mercury reels from when the space program was young.