Time for another look at the state of this website, why and how I’m doing it nearly four years on. See also my very first post, Why I’m Writing, and my March 2019 Update.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a problem accessing this website and it ended up being down for two days. My vast online audience didn’t seem to miss it, but I certainly did. I’ve come to realize that this project has moved beyond a hobby or casual line of inquiry for me into something more substantial for my well-being. I got very twitchy not being able to update or access the site for 48 hours. I didn’t really worry that my efforts were lost or could not be recovered; mainly I just didn’t know how to fill my time if I couldn’t work on the site.
I did have a fallback: in October 2019 I started keeping a Google Doc journal as a kind of scratchpad for ideas and posts, and it has become an ongoing entity. It’s someplace I can capture day-to-day (or week-to-week) thoughts. I think it will become an adjunct to Billzpage once I get up to 2019 in my photo timeline. I can link to my quarterly journal documents rather like I’ve tried to do with Cultural Memories posts.
The journal, and my own discipline in maintaining it, took on a life of its own with the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic starting in March 2020. I’m currently on Part 17 of my Coronavirus Journal, a more or less monthly record of our journey through the pandemic. The Coronavirus Journal posts are excerpts of my Google Doc journals.
I’m not sure of the value of this overall record, but I’ve enjoyed having an outlet to collect my own thoughts and perspectives on the rolling disasters and minor triumphs in my own life and the world at large through this time of pandemics and political upheavals. Sometime after we deem ourselves out of the pandemic, it may be interesting to look back on the whole episode and perhaps tease out some lessons.
Speaking of lessons, I’ve started to slowly work on a new section of the website called Lessons (I’ve kept the new page in draft mode for the time being). One of the first entries has been a set of Investment Lessons Learned which I’m glad to say Allie has already found useful. Overall, the Lessons section is meant to be a place to try to draw some useful conclusions or observations that I’ve gained over my life, and hopefully add more value to the site beyond an endless catalog of pictures and trips.
I was a little shocked and overwhelmed to discover that this website so far includes more than 250 published posts incorporating more than 14,000 photos and other media items. I can’t imagine I would have embarked on this project if I knew how large it would become. I know no one is likely to sit down and read it end-to-end, but I hope the organization of the site enables folks to wander around productively and/or search for some photo or anecdote that they want. At a minimum, I’ve found it useful to keep track of names, birthdates and where people lived when.
I’m currently working on photos and events from 2007 and I’ve found my progress is slowing as I creep further into the digital age. We have a lot more digital photos from this era going forward, plus I can access more email and other electronic documents to parse through and figure out what we were doing on a month-to-month basis. So yes, that’s a threat this website will become even more dense with flotsam and minutia that I hope I can catalog and begin to make sense of. I know the mountain will get steeper at least until I get to 2018 or so and catch up with the travels and journals I’ve already documented. That’s one of the goals of this whole effort.
Another diversion along the way — but a valuable one, I feel — was learning more about our family histories. It started last summer (2020) when I encountered Barb’s grandmother, Helen Fisher’s, family album. It had been sitting on our shelves among all the other albums and I’d never really looked at it. I was shocked to see it included information tracking back to the 1600’s. Making the effort to digitize that album and doing more research to make sense of its contents opened my eyes to the information available online and the value of gathering that data for ourselves.
I became curious about other branches of our families, especially my own. That led me to explorations of the Garbutt, Goodloe and Duncan lines which yielded much deeper history than we’d known. I didn’t expect this website to lead me into the rabbit holes of genealogical research but it’s been a (somewhat) entertaining and educational addition to the site. I hope that it also adds value to other family members and generations — it’s not all about me. I started a file of Genealogy Breadcrumbs with some ideas of other avenues someone may want to explore.
More recently, I’ve tried to supplement our few photos from Barb’s youth. I just completed adding nearly 500 photos that we scanned during our July 2021 trip to Colorado. They are now spread over five posts: Background on Fred and Louise’s families, Fred and Louise’s Album, Barb’s Album from Betsy, Chincoteague and Austria Ski Trips. I need to see if Betsy or Barb can help flesh out the narrative stories to accompany them. Barb has helped a little as she’s walked by from time to time but I still can’t get her to sit down and look at the site. With all these photos, we certainly have a more complete record of Barb’s youth and a somewhat better idea of Fred and Louise’s. I started to crack the nut of Louise’s parents, uncles and grandparents, too.
As I’ve researched further into our family backgrounds, I’ve given access to a wider range of family members. I now have 15 “subscribers” including including each of our siblings and next generation of nieces and nephew (there’s only one nephew (Scott) in the whole bunch…what’s up with that?). I don’t think anyone other than Laurie and sometimes Allie are regular readers, but at least they have access and I hope at some point will find the site more interesting or useful.
I’m pleased that this website has helped inspire Laurie to document more of her life and extensive travels. I’ve tried to help her with a workable format in Google Docs. She has much more interesting stories than I do, and I hope her efforts to write them down will be of value to herself, Maggie, and others down the line.
Though the care and feeding of this site has become an insanely time-intensive effort, I quite enjoy doing it and remain convinced it has value for myself and eventually for the family. I plan to stick with it.
I’m also convinced there is a broad market need for an easier method/format/tool to compile and organize this type of information. Google or Apple should be all over it; they are already close with their ability to automatically organize photos. Their AI tools could magically produce a rough draft of a user’s life or family history that one could then edit and fine tune. Then again, it only highlights how much they already know about us. I guess we’ll have to leave it to the Chinese government to implement.
Related Post: Why I’m Writing
Related Post: Why I’m Writing, 2019 Update
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