Category Archives: Genealogy

Bible study, expatriate life, family, Genealogy, self-publishing, The Forest Throne

Writing Hopes for 2026

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Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.

Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.

But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.

  • Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
  • Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
  • Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal  with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
  • The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
  • At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
  • One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.

There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.

family, Genealogy, St. Lucia, travel

My St. Lucia Genealogy

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The probate file confirmed what we had pretty much concluded beforehand, that George Victor Hepburn was NOT my great-great-grandfather. More likely he was my great-grandmother’s brother—though that is not yet confirmed.

Part of the reason for our recent trip to St. Lucia was to see what we could learn about my St. Lucia roots. We have a lot of what I call “family lore”, but not much of that is backed up by documentation. My maternal grandmother talked about St. Lucia all the time, and how they were high society there, having servants.

She came to the USA in May 1918, and my mother was born in September that year. I found documentation for those two events, a combination of recordings on calendars made by my grandmother’s uncle David Sexton. And we knew my grandmother’s mother, Henrietta (Hepburn) Sexton Harris. She lived well into her 90s, and I knew her and spent many a holiday when she visited in Rhode Island.

Although, it wasn’t until I made contact with cousins in New York City, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s half-sisters that the full story came out. But it came out as family lore. Henrietta was one of six siblings, but the cousins couldn’t agree on who those children were, nor on the name of her father. They agreed on three of the six, but not the other three. So, as the years progressed, I knew a trip to St. Lucia was necessary. But would it be productive?

My grandmother, Alfy Sexton, a year or so after emigrating to the US.

The answer is yes. The first morning our son and I drove to the St. Lucia archives. It’s not a big building from the outside, and they were in the process of moving from one building to another. But the women working there were friendly and helpful. I paid the research fee, then Charles did most of the talking. He had the names we were interested in, the type of documents we hoped to get copies of, and the years of interest. Meanwhile, the archivists were anxious to see the photos I had, and to scan them. One lady worked on scanning while another did a preliminary check of their indexes to see if maybe some of the documents we were interested in were in the archives. After the public hours closed, they would do a more complete check.

This was actually more than we’d hoped for. I had heard that the St. Lucia archives had few documents, and those disorganized—that many documents were destroyed in major fires in Castries in 1927 and 1948. Maybe some records were lost, but it seemed they had many extant, and an organized system for retrieving them.

We went back the next day to see what they actually found (in many places, sometimes an archive index can be erroneous). This gave us a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to have copies of. While we were doing this, I noticed the receptionist had one huge book open and was transcribing records. I didn’t come up to look over her shoulder to see what the records were. Suffice to say that additional deeds or marriages or birth records or powers of attorney or probate matters were added to the digital archives that day.

Those were the only two days we went to the archives. We paid fees  (cash only, though they take US dollars) to receive digital copies of the documents, and they came a week later as email attachments. Family lore was confirmed in some cases, but confusion added by other documents. Oh well, we have time to sort it all out, come up with ancestral link conclusions and working theories of paths for future research.

I’ve researched in a few courthouses in the US, but this was the first time for me to go to a foreign archive in the hope of receiving relevant documents and data. A good experience, though I suspect this was a one-time only experience.

family, Genealogy

R.I.P.: Evelyn Wildman Menzies

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Evelyn and Sonny Menzies in 1998

It was about June 1998. I obtained some data about my maternal family from old address books of my grandmother that I took from my dad’s house after his death. We knew almost nothing about her family except her mother’s name (Rita Harris, the last name from a later marriage) and that she was from St. Lucia; the names of two half-sisters, Hiris and Hazel (but not, at that time, of the third, Muriel). My grandmother had told us her half-sisters were spinsters who had no children. But in the address books I found their names with different last names. Both Hiris and Hazel were in NY, but Hazel’s address was changed from NY to Alburquerque.

Making a long story a little shorter, another name with a New Mexico address was Evelyn Menzies. I sent to the Albuquerque newspaper for an obituary for Hazel (who I learned had died there in 1993), which listed Evelyn Menzies as her daughter. If Hazel was my grandmother’s half-sister, Evelyn would be my mom’s half-first-cousin and her children my half-second-cousins.

I decided to write Evelyn out of the blue, saying you probably don’t know who I am, but my research suggests you’re my mom’s cousin. Here’s how that letter started:

My name is David Todd. I am the grandson of Alfy M. (Sexton) Dorion, who was a half-sister of Hazel (Harris) Wildman. My research indicates that you are Hazel’s daughter. I got your address from the Albuquerque phone book, and your name from Hazel’s obituary. My purpose in writing to you is to introduce myself and to hopefully share family history and information.

While growing up, I knew that my grandmother had two half-sisters, Hiris and Hazel, but we never had any contact with them, never knew their last names, if they had families, etc. While going through dad’s papers over the last eight months (he died last August), I found address books which included Hiris’ name and address in New York City, and Hazel’s name and addresses in NYC and then Albuquerque. I next checked the Social Security Death Index, which listed both Hiris and Hazel and gave death dates and locations. Finding Hazel as having died in Albuquerque in 1993, I sent off to the newspaper for a copy of her obituary. It arrived yesterday.

I gave her information about the family and an anecdote about my great-grandmother so that she would know that I really knew her. Before long Evelyn called me. She said she knew who I was, that she had always known about her cousin Dorothy and her three children, even had pictures of us. I asked her why we never knew about them, and why my grandmother never had photos or them. Evelyn said, “It’s because we’re black.”

She went on to say that my great-grandmother was approximately 1/2 black, meaning I was part black. That was a bombshell, listening to Evelyn on the phone that Sunday in August, 1998 and hearing her strong Brooklyn accent. I had no idea.

That family wedding in 2000. Four of my half-second cousins in this photo.

Evelyn invited us to come to NM and meet them. We did that in November 1998. Evelyn put together some meetings with other family in the area. I met all her children and their children. It was a great time. A couple of years later Evelyn had us back for their son’s wedding, and then came to our daughter’s wedding.

Our contacts in person were few after that, but we kept in touch by phone. I found it incredible that she accepted us so readily into her family. Through the meetings, Evelyn told me much about our mutual family and what she knew about the St. Lucia years. Because of her, a new world and culture opened to me.

Evelyn died on August 14 [see her obituary here] after a long life, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered around her. She is already missed by them all, me included.

Bible study, books, Genealogy, home improvements

Chipping Away

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The harvest is in progress, and a good harvest it is.

Today,  on our Independence Day holiday, my work continues. I transcribed another WW2 letter, bringing the total up to 13. No end in sight, but a pattern for what the letters are is beginning to emerge. I went through at least 50 scan files, verified that I have them also stored and properly named in OneDrive folders, and so was able to delete the scan files. Then brings me down to about 1325 left to go through, or about five weeks of work. I think it might actually be less than that, because I’ve already skipped close to 100 files that I’ll be keeping.

I picked blackberries this morning, close to a pint, from less than half the plants and only getting the easiest ones to pick. Cut back a few of the new branches so that the paths between rows are more easily navigable, and raked up the cuttings. The harvest is plentiful. After the season is over, I plan on a major cut back of the bushes. I have four rows of blackberry plants that have sprung up naturally. With judicious cutting on my part and a bit of training, these are producing a good harvest for three years in a row. But it’s at least twice as many blackberries as I need. So after this year’s harvest, and when the weather cools off some, I’ll take two rows out completely. I’m actually looking forward to that.

I’m finding the book I’m currently reading a bit of a slog (I have a habit of picking those), but I’ll get through the last 65% of it, somehow.

Decumulation continues. On Wednesday, we drove to south central Kansas and delivered to Lynda’s brother all the Cheney photos we don’t plan on keeping. That included six large framed photos and a large painting of the Cheney homestead ranch in Meade County. Her brother can now decide what to do with them. Good riddance to one burden. It frees us up to work on photos from the other side of her family and finish those, hopefully within a month.

Today I edited a chapter in my Bible study. Only two chapters to go. Then, I think one more read-through at a normal pace to check for duplication or incomplete sections, with hopefully only minor final edits, and it will be on to publishing.

Last night we walked to the municipal fireworks display. We don’t live far from where they shoot them off, but a ridge, a valley, and lots of tall trees prevent us from seeing them from our house. Driving there and getting involved in that mass of traffic is a pain. So for the first time we walked to the top of the ridge, a little over 1/3 mile, and joined a hundred or so people who had done the same thing. I don’t really care about fireworks all that much, but Lynda enjoyed it.

So as you can see, I’m staying busy. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bible study, family, Genealogy, letters, stock market

Summer Schedule, New Project

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The typing is tedious, especially reading 83-year-old pencil scratching…

It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.

So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.

…but I’ll get through it, one letter a day for now….

Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.

I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.

…but I have to admit I’m glad it’s not a bigger bin.

I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.

One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.

My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.

After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing.  Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.

So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.

I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed.  At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.

Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.

Stay tuned….

family, Genealogy, research

A Genealogical Triumph

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Ed Dorion as I knew him, back row in the middle. I’m in the front on the right, on my grandmother’s lap.

My days of genealogy research are mostly behind me. My main work in genealogy now is consolidating files and documenting family history, though I still dabble in raw research from time to time. I last reported on this blog about writing the story of how I learned who my natural paternal grandfather was.

A couple of years back, I decided to find out a little more about my step-grandfather, Edgar J. Dorion. He was a big part of our lives, as he and our grandmother often had to take care of us kids when Mom was in the hospital and Dad continued to work his nightshift job. But all I really knew about Edgar (we called him Gar) was that he was career Coastguard, had been in both WW1 and WW2, and a few other tidbits he threw our way.

My grandmother and step-grandfather, probably on their wedding day in 1949. In her house in Providence, RI, with Gilbert Stuard Jr. High School in the background.

It was somewhat late (I may have been 10) when I learned he was a step-grandfather, that he had been married before, and that he had daughters from that marriage. For whatever reason, I left him till late in my research efforts. The first thing I found out was not particularly flattering, an instance of severe miliary discipline from a stint in the US Navy before WW1 (though he was later pardoned), something he conveniently didn’t tell us about. Maybe that was one of the reasons I let research into his life go by the wayside for a while.

As a young Coastguard man, as my step-cousin’s family would have known him.

I picked it up again last July and got a little farther. Found an obituary for his first wife and one for one of his daughters. That gave me names of children and grandchildren and even let me find a great-granddaughter on Facebook. I sent her a message, but we haven’t made contact yet.

I picked this up again just after Memorial Day, and did my best to document what I found, save important stuff electronically, and prepare a good, comprehensive summary document. I found an obituary for his other daughter, got the name of her son, and found him on Facebook. He and I are step-first cousins who knew nothing about each other for the first 70+ years of our lives. I sent him an introductory message; he responded fairly quickly, and we’ve had some good message conversations since. Importantly, I now have a copy of an excellent studio photo of a young Ed Dorion, and he now has some snapshots of an older Ed Dorion. We both have a more complete picture of the life of a man who was important in both of our lives.

And, as far as genealogy research goes, a triumph like this wants me to do more and find other, previously unknown relatives.

Bible study, Christianity, Decumulation, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, Health, letters, Writing

Goals for June 2025

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Last month I resumed setting goals for the month. I had suspended this practice, which used to include progress, as my injuries and medical issues piled up in 2024 and continued in early 2025. But I decided to resume setting goals but not taking time to report progress on the prior month’s goals. So here are goals for June.

  • Begin editing Vol. 5 of the A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series. Based on how the last couple of volumes went, it’s likely I’ll finish it this month.
  • Continue with work on computer files. This, for now, will mainly  be checking scanned files to see if I’ve properly saved them and then get rid of the duplicate file.
  • Having done a good job on genealogy research this month, I’d like to continue it in June. This may be mainly organizing computer files, getting rid of duplicate material and superseded files, rather than new research.
  • Work some more on going through family photos. It would be nice to finish one of our four main families and send those photos off to the next family member who needs to deal with them.
  • Continue going through my father-in-law’s letter files. They are in approximate chronological order. I’m going through them one a day, from newest working backwards. At this rate it will take me a couple of years to get through them all.
  • Consolidate a few ideas I’ve had lately for future writing in the Documenting America series.

I have other things I’d like to accomplish, but these seem like enough to set for the month. Especially in consideration of the outdoor work I have to do in the blackberry patch.

family, Genealogy, stock market

Two Great Days

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I write this Thursday evening. It will be sort of a journal entry of the good things that happened the last two days. Having completed a writing project last week, I decided to take a week off from writing tasks. How to fill the time?

My work area in The Dungeon is still a mess. I have to make a concentrated effort at clean-up.

Wednesday morning I awoke feeling pretty good. After Bible reading and prayer in The Dungeon, I gave brief attention to one notebook of letters my late father-in-law left to us at his death. I’m very slowly, limiting myself to one letter a day so that the project doesn’t overwhelm me, converting the letters to digital files, either scanning or transcribing as needed. I started out working on my one letter for the day and dispatched that task quickly.

I then took time to finish my checkbook register, which I now keep as a spreadsheet due to my diminished handwriting after my last stroke. I didn’t quite finish that task, but I got it to the point that I should be able to finish it in about 30 minutes of budgeting. I had sort of planned to do that today, but decided to put it off till tomorrow.

At that point, I decided to get back into stock & options trading. I haven’t done this since my first seizure in December and thus haven’t earned any money—except for dividends on a few positions and interest. As it happened, I didn’t have too many positions when the seizure happened. Thus I didn’t participate very much in the market turmoil that has marked 2025 thus far. But Wednesday morning I put on a one day trade, and it closed at full profit. Made $102. Today I did the same thing, and made another $92. I’ll put that money aside for vacation. Hopefully today I’ll be able to make a similar low-risk trade and make it a trifecta.

That brought me to 9 a.m. and breakfast. Wednesday is our normal trash day, but on a holiday week it is usually delayed a day. But the City had nothing about the delay, nor did the trash company. Being unsure, I got the trash out right after breakfast.

Then it was back to The Dungeon, with 1 1/2 hours to kill until a writing networking time via Zoom. I decided to work on some e-file maintenance. I have over 2,900 files I’ve scanned and saved to a proper filing system, but never checked the scans to make sure they saved properly and then deleted the scan file. So I went back to doing that (I’d done a little the last couple of weeks). In that time, I was able to check around 75 files. Maybe two I couldn’t find in the place I expected to find them, so I saved or re-saved them, taking time to do a better job of choosing the right folder and a good file name. This is not high priority work—just something useful to do in odd minutes between things. But it felt good.

Then came the Zoom meeting, a time of on-line networking with other struggling writers. About 45 were on the Zoom meeting. We were divided into break-out rooms for 15 minutes, then shuffled into other break-out rooms. With some general discussion time, this fill 90 minutes of the planned two hours. At that point I dropped out. I came to realize that this kind of networking probably wasn’t the best use of my time. I’ll likely skip the next one.

Next came lunch and my reading time in the sunroom. I read a few pages in a magazine I’m trying to get through and get rid of, then almost my daily quota in an interesting literature book. I usually struggle to get all my reading done, but was able to come close in this session, though I still needed to carve out some time.

After that, since the ground was soaked from five straight days of rain, outdoor work would have been difficult so it was back to The Dungeon, monitor my stock trade, and on to the next task. I decided to do some genealogy research, spurred on to this from having dealt with some scanned genealogy files that morning. I decided to concentrate on my step-grandfather, find out little more about his first wife and his descendants with her.

Without boring you with the details, I found out a whole bunch, expanding a start to the research I had done the previous July. I created a file or two, corrected a couple of mistakes in on-line genealogy sites, and filled in a bunch of gaps. I worked on this the rest of the day, taking time off only to eat supper and watch some of the Titanic Sub documentary on the Discovery Channel.

I went to bed about 11, but my mind was so full of the productive day’s activities I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. But surprisingly, I think I did after wrestling my mind to quit dwelling on the good day just finished. Alas, a small disturbance later and I was wide awake. I got up at ten minutes after midnight and read. I completed the few pages left in the daily quota of the literature book and read in a missions book that I’m trying to get through simultaneously with the literature book. That was good.

You might ask, “How was it good to lose sleep?” Not to lose sleep, but to get my reading in. Instead of going back to bed, which would just wake me up, I turned the light out and leaned back the recliner. I must have fallen asleep right away, for the next thing I knew it was three hours later. The time I went back to bed and slept another three hours.

That brought me to Thursday morning, to the same routines tackled and finished. Except, instead of organizing files, I completed my research on my step-grandfather and his first wife and did most of the work of properly documenting that research. When I say “finished,” that’s a relative term. Genealogy research into anyone is never complete. You just come to stopping points and take breaks, waiting for that time to pick up that strain of research again.

Oh, and perhaps the best part of these two good days: I identified a grandson of my step grandfather, reached out to him on social media, and he responded. He and I are step-first cousins. We had a nice exchange of messages. Connecting with a newly found family member is always good.

What does Friday hold? Probably decumulation tasks, and getting closer to going through photos from one of our four main family lines.

Decumulation, family, Genealogy, History

The Burden of Photos

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The infamous “Jacob’s Well photo”. One copy should be sufficient. The next generation will most likely toss it.

Of the many things our parents left us, or came to us in other ways, I think the most burdensome is photos.

Photos? Yes, photos. Those pesky little glossy things, or some matte finish, depicting people of long ago, houses once owned or lived in, vehicles once driven, and landscapes visited. No doubt those who left them to us thought, “What a treasure this is for our children (or grandchildren), to see great-aunt Matilda all dressed up for the derby. Oh how they will cherish them.”

No idea who these people are. Cool car, though.

Except nobody now alive ever met great-aunt Matilda. Only those who studied the family genealogy knows who she was and how she fits into the family relationships. And only those who ever will study genealogy will ever care.

This was the situation after a week’s worth of work on the 5,000.

Photos tend to add up. Just looking at the photos on Lynda’s side of the family, I estimate that we have 8,000 photos. No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s probably 3,000 from her dad’s side and 5,000 from her mom’s side. Just looking at her dad’s side, he was something of a hobbyist photographer. He inherited various family photos from his parents, who got at least some of them from their parents. He looked at those old photos, some as tiny at 2×3 inches, and had enlargements made; then multiple copies of the enlargements; then smaller copies having the developer play around with the tint and border and resolution. So one tiny old photo marked “Jacob’s Well” on the back was shown to be a photo of his grandfather’s family, showing two older men, one older woman, and seven children (the youngest not yet born)—some on horses, some standing on the rocky landscape.

Jacob’s Well is a feature in Clark County, Kansas, now incorporated into a park. Except we’ve visited the park—not every square inch of it, mind you—the landscape looks more like what you see at the family ranch in Logan Township, Meade County, Kansas. I could believe the photo is mis-labeled, except another family member in another branch that didn’t even know each other until 2015 has a copy of the exact same 2×3 photo and it is also labeled “Jacob’s Well.” What to do?

Is this photo a keeper? Surely it’s the Cheney family, but how do you identify the people? One of the older men is the father, Seth. The other is uncle Frank Best (most likely). The older woman is mother Sarah, the youngest child Rose, the older girl Cora. But which of the others are William, Clarence, James, and Walter? We can make an educated guess, based on size. But these people were all standing at least 20 yards away from the cameraman. There’s really no way of knowing who’s who.

The photo is from 1898, based on Charlie, the youngest child, being born in 1899. The question becomes: how important is it to keep this photo? And the multiple copies of the enlargement? And the multiple copies of different tints, borders, and resolutions?

This has come up now because another family member, who didn’t want the photos when Lynda’s dad died in 1996, has accused us of hoarding them because we didn’t drag them out every Thanksgiving and Christmas so that we could look at them “as a family.” Now he wants to look at them, divvy them up, and do so at a high school reunion in July. Even though we would have to impose on a relative for a venue. Even though Lynda was thinking she didn’t particularly want to go to the reunion. And actually, the demand to go through the photos included the 5,000 from the other side of the family. It is physically impossible. Reunions are times to see friends, swap stories, share meals. How will it be possible to sort through these photos and make decisions on their final resting place on a reunion weekend, even if you layover a couple of extra days? You can’t; it’s impossible. And some day, we’ll have to do the same with all the photos we took over the years.

So we are going through them. Album by album, box by box, folder by folder. After three weeks, we can see a little light at the end of the tunnel on the 3,000 (estimated) from the dad’s side, and have made some progress, at least to the point of knowing what we have, on the mom’s side. Duplicates have been identified and those we want removed from the overall collection as keepers. The albums have been checked and are currently being re-checked. Four other albums have been consolidated into two and are ready for re-checking. We are very close to boxing the non-keepers and shipping them to this family member with a note saying, “We’re so done with these; keep what you want, destroy the rest.” The other 5,000 will hopefully follow in about two more weeks.

Yes, destroy them. Our kids won’t want them. We don’t know anyone else’s kids that want them or even want to see them.

What was meant to be a blessing, and what served as a blessing to three or four generations and maybe 100 people, are now a burden. Let them die a peaceful death.

Decumulation, Genealogy, stock market, Writing

The Word Is “Decumulation”

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Pulling writing papers out of the milk crate. I hope to be able to get rid of the crate.

This week I’ve back in the saddle, working in The Dungeon every day. Except this week I decided to do something different. I have only one chapter left to write in the Bible study I’m writing. And that’s the last of eight volumes in the Bible study series, only one volume of which I’ve so far published. I figure four more days of writing on this project.

But that is laid aside now, along with my normal stock trading activities, in favor or decumulation work. Yes, I finally figured out that’s the correct word to use for the process of getting rid of stuff. I’ve been using the word “dis-accumulation,” and all my spellcheckers have balked at its use. I don’t remember where I found the right word, but I was glad to do so.

I sold this box of books within a day of listing it. I wish all my books would sell that quickly.

We need to get out of our big house, into something smaller, hopefully closer to one of our kids. But that requires a lot of decumulation. We’ve been working on that, but perhaps somewhat half-heartedly. For the last six or so years we’ve been saying we’ll decumulate so that we can move in two years. But that two years keeps slipping.

Well, after being gone to Massachusetts last week to visit our son and his husband, I decided to make a more serious effort at decumulation. Saturday, I got another 35 books listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Twenty of those were in two boxes of 10 each for one price. I sold those this week, though haven’t yet got them in the customer’s hands.

A pile of papers here, a pile there. I’ll slowly whittle them down over the next few weeks.

Monday, I decided to tackle the many papers in the house. I’ve done much of this over the last few years. These papers fall in three categories: stock trading, genealogy, and writing. I’ve already discarded most of my stock trading learning courses. I scanned and digitized a lot of genealogy papers, but was holding back a few key 3-ring binders. Well, beginning on Monday I started scanning, digitizing, and discarding those papers. I figure I’m averaging close to 200 sheets of paper a day. I’m down now to about four notebooks, which I think I’ll get through two by Saturday, and the other wo next week.

Tuesday evening, I pulled from my closet the milk crate I’ve used to storing drafts of most of my early writings. This saving of drafts/edits/research papers is what an experienced writer suggested in a conference I attended many years ago. He’s a successful novelist—no telling how many boxes of papers he has in his basement. He might not be thinking about downsizing. Or if he does, he’s famous enough to donate his writing papers to his alma mater and they’d be happy to receive them. I don’t have that status.

So all his week, I’ve gone down to The Dungeon, and spent time at my scanner. Scan something. Got back to my computer, pull up the scanned file, and save it to an organized place on my computer. With my genealogy papers, I had to first create some folders and move old scans from temporary places to the new place. But that didn’t slow me down much.

I take a break at noon to do some reading and have kept evenings clear. I feel good about what I’ve done so far. Perhaps in a week I’ll be able to report significant progress at decumulation.