Saturday, December 20, 2008

I Think I'm Out of Control

Genealogy is my primary distraction of choice when I need to relax. Until recently, I had a hodge podge of black notebooks that held my family records. I decided a couple of months ago that I needed to invest in a collection of identical notebooks that would all stand the same height, be the same width, and have the same labels. So I set out to revamp the family archives. Below you will see the result.

The notebooks with the brown spines are my maternal lines. Those with the blue spines are my paternal lines. And, the tally? Drum roll, please....

Almon - 1
Dancy - 1
Dunavan - 1
Dunkin - 1
Baker - 1
Beauchamp - 1
Frankum - 3
Harnesburger - 1
Harris - 1
Hodge - 6 (soon to be 7)
Huddleston - 3
Hughes - 1
Lentz - 3
Mason - 3
McAfee - 4
Mobley - 3
Morgan - 1
Niccum - 1
Reese - 1
Rice - 1
Smith - 1
Swearingen - 1
Wilcoxen - 3

A grand total of 43 notebooks and at least a half-dozen of those are straining at the seams. Just plain scary.

Do you know who your ancestors are? I do!

LSW

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are way cool cousin! I wish I had the patience required to do what you do. I'm glad that someone is chronicling our history. I received my copy of the newsletter today. If I'm lucky, I'll get to kick back in my chair later and finish reading it. Cold snap is coming, we just got finished mixing up a huge batch of hot chocolate mix...got two one-gallon ziplocks full now. Got peanut brittle too. I'm on my seven days off, let it get cold. See if I care. I have books and hot chocolate.

Anonymous said...

WOW! Your books make it back on the shelf! Teach us how, oh great one!

LSW said...

Oh, the shelves are full, all right. What you don't see is that a good number of those shelves are double-rows of books. There is another bookshelf upstairs, three bookshelves in Mother's room, boxes of books out in the garage (including one box that your Mother forgot to take with her at Thanksgiving)and still there are piles of books in corners of almost every room of the house. I may not have much in the kitchen pantry, but I will never go hungry for books.

MiniKat said...

That's a really cool idea. I think I will suggest it to the sister that does our family's lines. She kept everything on a computer until it croaked on her. A friend was able to save her data though.

LSW said...

My laptop crashed a couple of weeks ago and it is where I keep all my computer genealogy. Fortunately I had taken a backup about a month previously. The good news is that little brother was able to resurrect it, but the fact remains that computers do crash from time to time and I'm not about to lose all my hard work. So, I have 43 notebooks of hardcopy to back up my work on the computer that backs up the work in my notebooks.
LSW