Genealogy #67

I have been doing genealogy for a number of years off and on. When I first started, there was one particular person that I was looking for who was our family's "black sheep." I was determined that I would find him no matter what it took. I looked high and low for that scoundrel for several years and decided to give it a rest. I worked on other family trees for several years before I decided to try again. The two things I learned in all of this that I would like to pass on is

#1 Don't give up! When I decided to take a break, my search had met dead ends in many states and places and was beginning to appear to be an impossible task. Ultimately when I returned to searching I met with success.....at last!

#2 What kept me from being successful in my pursuit was that I kept trying to find him as a head of household. The sad truth is that he was hiding in plain sight....or pretty close. Once I got it out of my head to pursue males as heads of households and I tried his sister, Lucy. Low and behold....there he was! He left his family and moved in with his sister across town while they lived under a cliff. Nice guy! The interesting thing in all this is that as I progressed in my search I found out that his uncle had written The History of the Valley of Virginia. Both his father and uncle were well respected lawyers. I have a family member who corresponded with Abe Lincoln and one with letters from Thomas Jefferson that are actually in three genealogy libraries! Didn't see that coming from the family of this guy that was a scoundrel! Just goes to show that genealogy can be a really interesting hobby that is full of turns and twist.

#30

Pre-wedding Statement

I have placed items on the S: drive before so I skipped that part of item #30. I went through the P: drive and did a bit of clean up there as well. I have already removed some things to a flash drive several months ago so that has aided clean up. The oldest things I found were some mileage and budget forms from 2006. Those have now been deleted. The process of paring down continues with the email and the file clean out. Because of the upcoming wedding, I wanted to get as much done before hand as possible. I currently have about 1/3 of the total of emails that I have seen on occasion in my account and I will continue through month's end to rid myself of that nemesis. All in all it has been going better than I thought it would. I am saving this as a draft in the hope that I can add a paragraph at the end of the month with the proclamation that "I am free at last.!"

Post Wedding Statement

Well, I am not totally free, but I am much, much closer, and definitely feel that I will be free by the start of summer reading at the very latest and hopefully much, much sooner!!! I am down to about 1/6 of the total of emails that I have seen piled up in my account. I am also dealing with and getting rid of new emails as soon as I can after receiving them.

#29

Well, I created a gmail account for myself instead of adding yet another bunch of email to my lonestar.edu account. I cleaned out my address book and deleted some folders that were passe. I have a large number of unread emails that I intend to attack and delete first, and then I will look to see what I can put into folders and after that what can be deleted. Since I have a large glut of unread email, this is going to take some time, but I hope to have the unread emails cleared out by week's end. One thing that I wish we could do is stop all the superfluous email that we receive from the college that has absolutely nothing to do with the library. It is really annoying to have to deal with that, but guess we are stuck with it. Because I have a large number of posts to sort out, it is not something that is going to be able to be accomplished overnight. I have been trying to get all the email read and definitely get rid of ones that are no longer necessary. I am going to try not to skip over messages, but either read, file or delete them as they come in. I intend starting today to purge or file at least 25 emails a day until my account is cleaned up. Because I will be taking two weeks of because of the wedding, I will not be able to be totally finished with this project in April; however, I am setting a target date of May 30th. Because of the size of my account and the fact that some days there is not enough time available to work on this project with summer reading coming up, I feel that this is a reasonable deadline and one that I can meet or beat.

Spring Cleaning - Don't Clutter Up

I was amazed to find out how much it cost to store files on the computers! That was a real eye opener and for that single reason alone I will be paring down my files. I signed up for a Ta-da List as that would be my preferred method to keep track of things on line as opposed to Bla-bla, Google calendar or the Milk List. My daughter is getting married on the 19th so I am already putting it to good use with a last minute checklist.

Week 10, #23

Wow! What can I say? This has been a much more interesting and exciting journey than I ever thought it could be. I am so glad to have taken a peek "down the rabbit hole" and fallen in. I had more than enough hours for the year as I usually do. I always like learning new things and have more hours than I need every year. Having made that statement, I now have to confess that I was jarred out of my complacentness by the offer of rollover training credits.....as though I will need them.......go figure.

There were a number of things that I about which I enjoyed learning. I really liked enhancing photographs as well as utilizing mashups and tools. One surprise was creating an avatar. I wasn't that interested and was just going to do something simple and not spend a lot of time on it. Silly me! Once I found the ice skates, I had to completely redo my avatar! In addition, I felt the same way about Social Networking, but discovered there were a couple that were of interest to me. I was amazed to find decorating and cats in the social networking sites. I enjoyed Library Thing and thought I would make use of it, but so far I haven't. I do like Library Elf. I didn't think I was going to, but I actually like him better than my HCPL reminder emails. YouTube was an interesting experience. I was not planning on spending much time on it, and once again, I was drawn in.

The downloading media experience was awesome as well. I found books to read to myself, and books to record for others.

Some of the things I won't probably use again, but am happy to know about so that I can help someone esle were the RSS Feeds and Web-Based apps. Maybe at some point in the future the web-based apps will apply more to my life, but right now they don't.

This whole experience has been an amazing journey. I was a reluctant "tourist" at first, but am thankful for the trip.

I look forward to new an exciting experiences in the future. All aboard!!!

Week 9, #22

All I can say is WOW! I had looked at OverDrive a bit before, but had never heard of WOWIO and LibriVox. I was immediately excited about LibriVox. Before moving down here 20 years ago, I had been studying Braille transcribing and was just about to submit my manuscript to the Library of Congress for certification. Unfortunately, we had to move before I could complete the book and so I was unable to take my transcribing machine with me. I was very disappointed, but today I found something else that I can volunteer to do and that is record books. Fantastic! I am so excited! I have my account set up and hope to soon be joining in with the rest of the readers. WOWIO took forever to sign up for, but they had several books that I immediately placed in my Queue. I put Logic Puzzles, a biography on Neil Young called Being Young, Adams vs. Jefferson, Backyard Wedding Makeover, and Vinegar: A Guide to the Many tpes and Their Uses Around the Home. That should keep me busy for a bit! While I do like OverDrive and it's multifacited delivery of the titles, I found that WOWIO appealed to me more because I found more titles that I couldn't live without.

Week 9 #21

I added LibVibe, childrensbookradio and Uncontrolled Vocabulary podcasts to my RSS feed. Most podcasts I looked at were interesting, but in general, I did not find many that I would want to follow on a continued basis. I think that it is great that it provides a creative outlet for those who would not normally get the chance to appear publicly to speak about subjects they are passionate about. It is a great forum for those looking for a place to express themselves.