Watershed moments

 In our lives are many watershed moments but I think the biggest other than the birth of our children might just be marriage and if your husband dies before you then widowhood. One must struggle to become one person again and having married at 20 when I was still living at home with my family this change at 75 sometimes seems impossible to make. There is just so much to handle that you do not really want to do. 

Breaking up Ed's library has been a struggle for me but my daughter is very organized and we are well into that and he would want people to be able to use all of these books to help them as they helped him. He enjoyed every one of them as they took him on his trips back through time. Not only in a written way but we actually went to these many places that his people lived in and visited the Churches, the graveyards where many times grandparents were buried with stones still lovingly cared for even after several hundred years. Attending local American conferences he often met 5th, 6th etc cousins who have never moved from that area. He was thrilled at what he found and each passing year of his retirement he found more. We were getting into the really distant ancestors and finding details became more and more difficult but we haunted all those old record offices and kept finding them. 

But as his health declined the trips were harder for him but he pushed himself anyway and we walked through so many graveyards looking for particular stones. Many times people had noted the latitude and longitude and with our GPS we found them. Modern inventions have certainly made genealogy a lot easier. Sometimes I dream that his spirit is visiting all of these places he still wanted to look at and it is comforting. God be with you Edward always and I know your spirit continues with me to the end of my days. That spirit of adventure and thrill at discovery which you had in abundance. 

The process though of dismantling everything that he put together is so very hard. Everything organized by shelf into areas for rapid consultation. If anyone called him he could immediately bring out the books that he needed to carry on that conversation. He sent information to so many cousins through the years. It is that material that he accumulated in family folders that I need to scan and share. Some of it I will put up on his website which will continue as my daughter will manage it later. Some of it I will offer to people with whom he particularly corresponded. It will take me a while but I am starting to see my research time ahead of me now and part of each day I will devote to working on his boxes. 

Coming in to genealogy late I am pretty much entirely electronic. I will again give some of my books to the OGS library as well that I no longer look at. I scan what I want and then I can have it all online. I have one large plastic bin of records that I mostly purchased or bought scanned but eventually along with my collection of  fiche I will give it all to the Anglican archives if they still want them. They are mostly parish registers or other documents that pertain to the parish system.