About

The reason for the blog is simple — I’m getting old enough that I’m starting to worry that when I’m gone all the stories and memories about people I loved will be gone and no one will remember them, so this is my way of sharing those stories. This is a “rest of my lifetime” project so I will work at it gradually over the years. This is one website that won’t be finished anytime soon, if ever. I hope it will keep growing.

My original concept expanded as my efforts to digitalize all paper spread to old family photos and documents so I will be adding those so future generations will be able to easily access the information.

The goal for the website expanded once again when I started searching for information about my dad. While I am proudly able to trace my mother’s Elton lineage all the way back to  the year 495 in Norway, I knew next to nothing about the Smith side of the family. I know his wish was to protect us from his painful childhood, but whoever those people were they can’t hurt us anymore so I hope he wouldn’t mind me digging into things.

Most importantly, I don’t want Josh to be forgotten.

I will also post events remembered and stories told to me through the years, but they will only be as accurate as the story told at that time and my memory now of the telling. Some of the stories from my dad were very painful to hear so I remember them vividly. Why is it the bad stuff stays crystal clear and the warm, fuzzy stuff becomes less clear with time?

If you feel there are errors you can post comments with your recollection of the events. If you’d like copies of any of the images or documents I would also be happy to send full size images to anyone who is interested. If you want to contribute, let me know and I’ll set you up so you can add posts.

As someone who has always loved history it’s pretty fun to now be the historian.

Note added 8/19/2012

For someone who historically hasn’t been overwhelmed with feelings of patience, this is turning into quite the project. Finding pictures, scanning them (which takes forever), cleaning them up in Photoshop, and then writing a post and embedding the images. Sheesh — I hope I get this done before I die.

Anyway, I have been just scanning and adding posts as I run across things and it has occurred to me that with no natural progression of order it’s going to be hard to wade through in the future so I’ve tried to come up with a scheme to order things.

I started this project in March 2012, but I’m going to change the dates on all historical posts to the following months so when you look at post for an individual or family name they should be in a fairly decent chronological order. The research leading to the information will be dated so if falls before the historical information so the reader will understand where it came from

Decade	Year of Post
Actual	2013
Actual	2012
2010’s	2011
2000’s	2010
1990’s	2009
1980’s	2008
1970’s	2007
1960’s	2006
1950’s	2005
1940’s	2004
1930’s	2003
1920’s	2002
1910’s	2001
1900’s	2000
1890’s	1999
1880’s	1998