What Changing PC's Can Do for You

I just swapped out an old PC for a new one. Before doing that I backed up everything important by sending it to the cloud. This reminded me that I had *years* (eleven, it turned out) of backup CD's and DVD's. I decided to go through them, keeping only the latest version of everything, "just in case." In fact, although I'll have cloud backup for everything, I have now resolved to make a DVD backup of everything important once a year, again just in case. Uneverno.

Without segue, I must tell you that before my father died I had a conversation with him in which I hoped aloud that he would document whatever he knew about the family, because "When you go, nobody is going to know anything."

This got him interested in genealogy. He was retired, and wound up spending many a day in public libraries and in cemeteries in various parts of New England. I do think it made his declining years more interesting.

This also led to conversations about his childhood and I asked him to write down whatever he remembered about his life during the depression. He sent me a number of typewritten pages (typed on an old Underwood typewriter which had only capital letters), and asked me to make copies or transcribe the material and send a copy to each of my three siblings. This I did, sending him a copy as well. The material he sent covered more than the depression period, beginning prior to that and ending nearly fifty years after it.

I found a copy of my transcription in my old PC backup files (Aha! The missing segue appears.)

The material is a treasure to me, and while it won't be that to you, you might find some of it interesting. Beginning with my next post here, sometime in the next several days, I will post what I transcribed and sent to him, my brothers, and my sister.

That material included some parenthetic comments from me, generally identified as being from "Jr," which I will break out from the main body of the text so that those of you not familiar with the family (aka "everybody") will be able to keep track of the main thread. I'll leave all names intact. I'll not provide information about names that pop in and out of the story as they are simply tangential references he thought I might be interested in.

I thnk this is going to appear in three parts, which is how he broke it down for me.