Cleaning out old papers

[amanda_lodden]

As I start to wade through the boxes in my basement that came from my Mom's house, I found that she has become the Keeper of the Family History for my maternal line. This isn't terribly surprising; she's the only child of an only surviving child (my grandmother's little sister died when she was almost ten; someone remind me to put the story down in writing at some point, as Mom and I are the only remaining people who have heard it and I doubt Mom's in much of a position to do anything with it at this point).

I, however, refuse to haul boxes and boxes of papers that only mean something to ancestors long dead around for the rest of my life. Things that are so far gone that I can't even identify the people involved will be tossed unceremoniously, unless I can glean enough information to figure out what distant relative to pass it over to. Things that I can attach a bit of background to will be turned electronic and put somewhere where others can share not just the item itself but also the beauty behind it. Things that have hatred and ugliness behind them (letters sent just prior to divorces, etc) will be disposed of as the toxic waste that they are. There's enough ugliness out there already, there's no need to immortalize someone else's.

In other words: be warned that there will likely be postings here at random intervals that describe various aspects of my family history.

However, I will spare all of you the picture of my great-great-grandmother in her casket. Thankfully I had seen _The Others_ and remembered from that movie that it was common in a certain era to take pictures of the dead. It kept me from freaking out entirely, though it was still rather disturbing.

Comments

[ztepfinat0r.livejournal.com]

I was the keeper of the family history on my father's side until I moved to California. I then appointed my uncle as keeper. But I'm still the go-to person for genealogical research. I LOVE family histories and look forward to your posts on the subject. :)

[amanda_lodden.livejournal.com]

Do you have any recommendations for places or programs to keep it all organized online? I've been playing with Ancestry.com, but every time I turn around they're giving me a "you can't do that unless you pay money every month" screen. Or even better, the page will sit with a little "searching" icon after I've entered some new data and become horribly unresponsive-- and then when it's finished searching it won't let me see whatever its found.

I just want a place to put up a simple family tree with names, dates, and locations so that I can link to it from my own site to give people an idea of who the picture/story/whatever is and how that person relates to me.

[ztepfinat0r.livejournal.com]

I know, I hate Ancestry.com/Genealogy.com for that reason. I only use their services to ask about names or advertise my research in forums.

There's some free ancestry software out there - I think most of it is windows-based though.

Personal Ancestral File is what I started off with, and it allowed me to make simple HTML pages.
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/paf/

This is a bit dated and the photos need to be updated, but an example of what you can do on the web with Personal Ancestral File is at:
http://www.stephsfamily.com/PAF/Milne/

There's also Legacy 6.0 Family Tree (but I've not tried it)
http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/Download.asp

I'm on a Mac now, so I'll be looking for free ancestry software again when I have time.
http://genealogy.about.com/od/software_mac/

In the meantime, any research I've been doing has just been updated via my shell acct in vi, heh...

[bitterflower.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you've found a treasure trove, Amanda.
I love reading old letters and papers and look forward to you sharing some from your family.

My Papa shows me letters he wrote to his dad from Panama in WW2. It still cracks me up to read his asking my great-grandparents for bowling money, all the way from South America. And then there are the love letters to my Grandma, those are priceless too.

[(Anonymous)]

I've got Family Tree Viewer that you can use, and of course Shane has a more recent, and cracked, copy of FTV. It's a great piece of software, but will take you about a day or two to learn to use. It's pretty weighty. It keeps track of ANYTHING.