Columbus OH

Finally, some real news.

I finally overcame my torpor and developed a little initiative.  

As I have explained before, Yahoo arbitrarily closed down it's Geocities service last year -- which of course took my former family history site down with it.  This did not disturb me too greatly because I assumed that with so many other relatives interested in family history, and with so many free genealogy services available today, one or the totality of my relatives long ago would have replaced and indeed improved upon my primitive site -- it  had been, after all, 15-year-old technology.  

But recently I went looking for some of that family info.  Lo and behold, I couldn't find it anywhere.  It was as if the Fran(c)kes and all the rest of my huge tribe never existed.  Even Google didn't know.

So I resolved to restore the data to the internet, with a few simple modern improvements.  

• First, I reserved a site on Google sites, thought up an overall format, and set out chapter headings for an (over-)ambitious narrative.  Of course at this point the chapters were empty, but that will give me something to do on cold winter nights.
• In the 15 year since I first set up my Geocities offering, genealogy sites have proliferated.  Some of them allow people to post their family trees, and one (Geni) makes the intriguing promise to link one's local family tree to all the others  around the world.  And their display is colorful.

This was not something I could pass up.  I went to Geni and immediately started to post the family tree data from my old Geocities site.  With the additional space Geni provided I was able to add all the (deceased) relatives I could remember, including all the people that were related by marriage.  I also was able to add all the entries my mother had teased out of the Latter Day Saints library in Salt Lake City, thirty years ago, my paternal grandmother 50 years ago, and others even further back.  All this gave me enough of a base to pluck additional data from the the internet: Wikipedia, Google, ancestry.com, and all the rest.  Indeed, I have reached the point where there is no end to it all -- the more people I add, the more there are to add.

Now I know some relatives have privacy concerns.  So let me assure everyone that I've not added any information about any living relative, nor information that I have received from any living relative.  The core of this tree is the same one I published 15 years ago on Geocities, and the additions have come primarily from my mother's gleanings and various internet reference services.  It is all public information available to anyone with an internet connection and the initiative to go chase it -- no secrets here.

So now the tools are there.  I passionately hope first, that the other genealogists in this impressively extended family will read this entry, and then be irresistibly inspired to add to these beginnings.  Maybe Geni's grandiose goals really can be reached.

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Just for medical followup:  

• Bobbi remains on the surgery schedule for 17 December and is attending Physical Therapy several days a week in preparation.  
• Lew also attends PT in his continuing attempt to evade the knife.  
• Smokey continues to heal according to schedule, not even noticing the results of his surgery.  But he still is lazy.  
• Finally, our little calico kitty has joined the ranks of the patients.  For the past few months she has acted just like a human patient with an inhalant allergy -- runny, sniffly nose, watery eyes, bouts of sneezing around sunup and sundown.  She sounded miserable.  So we let the local vet take a few tries at straightening her out, without success.  We got a specialist referral -- he did a very thorough (=expensive) workup with CT scan, numerous chemistries, and even anterior and posterior rhinoscopy.  All the news was relatively good -- her nose was inflamed, but he found to tumors, foreign bodies, or other ominous things.  The chemistries and the biopsies are not back yet, so we wait...

Hopefully all of you are in better health than we and will be able to enjoy a festive holiday season.  Hopefully we'll also add at least one more entry before then -- just don't hold your breath.

        Peace and Love from two aging hippies.