Another Weekend - Big Deal!

by Pa Rock
Chronic Whiner

I'm old enough that the days seem to fly by. I manage to stay very busy at my job, and like the rest of America, I live for the weekends. Unfortunately, the weekends also seem to fly by.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I am busy retyping my old newspaper genealogy column, Rootbound in the Hills, into a blog format that I will then carefully index six ways from Sunday. There are two-hundred-and-forty-two individual columns in the set, and each is loaded with specific dates, unusual surnames, and strange place locations from the last century that all require careful transcribing and proof-reading. I am also copying from the original clippings, which were banged out by newspaper workers in small towns who didn't have the luxury of working slowly - so I am encountering many spelling mistakes and obvious errors. It is not a chore for the faint-of-heart.

In order to get this project done in my lifetime, I have set a rigorous schedule and am trying very hard to stick to it. I retype one column every weekday evening, and three each Saturday and Sunday. That comes to eleven a week. This morning I just finished number seventy-five, and should be through number seventy-seven by the time I collapse into bed tonight.

The day will also include weekly grocery shopping, a trip to the gym, and a sojourn to Best Buy so they can fix a mess that I made while trying to load a software program onto my new computer. Sunday will be much the same, but the shopping will be replaced with household chores such as doing the laundry and any necessary cleaning. I don't have people or pets to pick up after, but I do have a couple of dozen plants that require regular nurturance and occasional bit of light conversation. If I have letters to write, that usually happens on Sunday also. And then I also try to post to this Ramble most days.

I have considered having a nervous breakdown, but there just isn't time!

Correspondence as History

The following was also taken from a Rootbound in the Hills column from twenty years ago. It was good advice then, and it remains so today:

More Ramblings: Last week I discussed the importance of preserving the history of your immediate family, and suggested keeping a daily journal as one way of meeting this important obligation to the future. I neglected to mention that a lot of family history is written down and then thrown out. Personal letters, those from relatives and friends, offer a wealth of information about the day-to-day ordinary experiences that make up life. Most good family historians supplement their journal-writing with a correspondence file. Gramma's letters may not mean much today, but they will after she's been gone for a few years! Some people even go so far as to copy the letters that they send to others, and place the copies in their files.

If you don't preserve your own history, some day your trail through life may fade to little more than what's chiseled on your tombstone. Think about! And don't even get me started on the importance of labelling photographs and snapshots!

Rootbound in the Hills

Over twenty years ago I began penning a column on Ozarks genealogy that wound up being carried by fifteen small newspapers in southwest Missouri. That column was called Rootbound in the Hills. It ran for 242 continuous weeks.

Today I have begun posting those old Rootbound columns on the internet. It will take several months before I will be able to get them all up. When that is accomplished, I will also post a comprehensive name index so that the collection will be easy to access for family research.

You may view the Rootbound collection at: www.rootboundinthehills.blogspot.com