I finished re-formatting our family genealogies!

Back in the late 60s Mom put together two books about our family genealogy. One was her side of the family with the information she had accumulated in twenty years of serious research, interviews with elderly family members, and correspondence with more distant relatives. The other was some of the information Dad's mother had put together from her research and her father's research and covered over a hundred years of work. Grandmother had been trying to get it finalized when she fell from a ladder and broke her hip. She passed away before she could get back to her genealogy so Mom took her notes and put a book together.

Mom only made a few copies for the immediate family and the books were in legal format. In addition, they were copied on cheap photocopiers not made for reproducing photographs or old documents. So when I wanted to pass copies along to my nieces and nephews, there were problems with just scanning the old copies. For the last few months, I have taken scans of my old copies, Mom's originals, the original documents and photographs. I transcribed the documents that had not been done before.

Now I have regular letter sized pages, more photos and documents, full transcriptions of all the documents, all saved to PDF format, AND printed copies on the way!

What I did not do was add all the new information I have found in the last year or so OR re-organize the original data in any way. I did add a little new information, but then realized I did not have time to be comprehensive about it. That will be my future project, as well as getting the information up on a web site so the next generation can access it rather than deal with printed material.

My deadline was this weekend. Sunday we are giving a party for my parents - their 65th wedding anniversary is next Wednesday but a weekend was the best time for us all to get together. I wanted to have at least one version of the re-edited genealogies for my parents in time for the party.

What a labor of love! It must feel so good to complete it in time for your parents anniversary. I'm sure they'll be thrilled with your gift.

I have collected so much that they did not have access to years ago when they were actively researching.

Also, for anyone who wants to put together a document in PDF format but who does not have a copy of Adobe Acrobat - many FedEx Office locations have computers you can "rent" on site for relatively little and Acrobat is one of the programs on those computers.

I used WordPerfect at home and the newer version I have can publish to PDF, but to make editing, adding new material, and changing page order easier, I created my books a few pages at a time, published each section to PDFs, then took that collection into FedEx and merged them all into a single document.

If you use Word, they have that on the computers at FedEx and you can go straight from Word to Acrobat.

Disclosure: Hubby works for FedEx. He can use the work computers to put documents together if they have extra time, but at the point when I needed to finalize my books they were too busy. It took less than an hour to finish mine up which cost less than $20 in computer use. That is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a copy of Acrobat!

I'm still in the research stage, but will definitely keep this for future use. I have a great deal of info on my mother's people, but am beginning to think my dad's folks were in the witness protection program! I can get back to my 3rd g.grandfather, but the trail goes cold after that. His wife is also very elusive, as is my g.grandmother.

I recently moved back to my hometown in Va, so am much nearer to the county where all of dad's family lived. I'm hoping to go to the county courthouse as soon as the weather permits, but it's snowed 3 times in the 2 weeks I've been back, so am limited to the internet for now. I'm also still unpacking, so guess I should finish before I embark on a genealogical field trip!

Good luck, and please keep us posted on your progress.

Some can be so drastic to make a new name. For instance, my bro-in-law's family had Rathel which was variously spelled as Rayfield, Raffield, Rafael, and more. The other problem is apparently they lied to the census takers. One decade they were from Georgia and could not read, the next they were from North Carolina and could read. It makes tracking them back difficult.