Wrapping Up the Family History

 

by Pa Rock

Determined Typist

Yesterday in this space I began a chronicle of my writing achievements, or lack thereof.  I ended that posting with a promise to pick up yesterday's effort again today and write about the things on which I am currently working.

This blog, of course, absorbs every morning.  It is my self-imposed life sentence of being chained to the typing table in front of my living room window.  I begin each day there, and when the daily blog is finished, it is time to make the dogs' lunch.  In the afternoons I spend as much time as I can working on the remaining writing projects that I would like to have completed before 'the roll is called up yonder,' something which grows noticeably closer with each spin of the Earth.   

There are currently three final projects on the horizon.

The first two final projects are a pair of family history books, one on my father and his ancestry, that the other on my mother and her people.   Most of the content for those volumes is already written.  During the plague year of 2021, I used this blog once each week to do short, intensive biographies of ancestors whom I had identified through family research over the past forty years or more.  I called those weekly postings "Ancestor Archives."  They basically entertained a few close relatives and the occasional distant cousins and other strangers who discovered a shared relative though a search engine.  But, more importantly, they forced me into a serious family research mode so that I would accumulate and organize enough material to meet each week's deadline for an "Ancestor Archives" posting.

I finished that effort just before the end of 2021, and then transferred the material from the blog postings into a Microsoft Word format, and organized them into two books, one for my father's MACY and NUTT lineage, and the other for my mother' SREAVES and ROARK ancestry.  They were not ready to publish, but the meat of the material was organized and awaiting final formatting, editing, and the addition of any new material that was discovered in the interim.  I emailed copies to my son in Kansas City for safekeeping, and filed my copies away while continuing with occasional family research as time and circumstance permitted.

Last winter I had some astonishingly good luck while researching at the Mormon Library in Salt Lake City, and added significant information to my mother's family tree, and I may make one more trip to Utah this winter to search for more material.  But, in the meantime, I have gotten back to the family tree book projects and am now making good progress, and I hope to have them finished and ready to place in libraries by next spring.

Those two books, in addition to my "Rootbound in the Hills" genealogy newspaper column collection which I organized into an indexed book form several years ago, will be invaluable tools for family researchers, especially those digging through roots in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas. 

I hope they help to cover the cost of all the spins I have taken on Planet Earth.  It's been a great ride, and I would like to spin off knowing that I have left behind something of permanent value - in addition to my children and grandchildren, of course!

(Tomorrow's posting will feature the third final project:  Pa Rock's attempt to write the great American novel.)