Planning

I've been sorting out photos for weeks.  It's a depressing job, for the most part.  

I'm pitching into the trash plenty of pictures I no longer want.  What constitutes "not wanting" varies from time to time.  

Sometimes I discard a poorly lit photo and sometimes I keep one such, because of who is in the photograph.  Sometimes I laugh at a picture, sometimes I cry.

Lately, I discard photos that are from my past - trips I've taken by myself - and which have no meaning for anyone else.  

I've also rid my albums of photos from trips Steve and I took together.  When you can't share the memories with the one who was with you, there's very little reason to keep those pictures.  I have kept some, but very few - from two special trips.

I've almost overwhelmed myself with my project.  I thought, as I sorted and grouped, that I needed to make an album for each of my 5 grandchildren, an album for their parents, an album for myself, and one for each of my brothers.  Am I digging a deep hole there, or what?!

I finally decided that after scanning all the photos (which I was doing anyway) and putting together pages of each person, printing them would save me a lot of time. Then all the paper photos of the grandkids can go in my album.  Yes, we Oklahoma dinosaurs still use film.  I take a lot of digital pictures so they can go on the computer, but film is still my favorite way to photograph.

So, tiring of looking at the pictures, I hauled out my atlas and thought once again about the trip I'm planning for this fall.  I intend to leave about the middle of September and head on a route that will take me to a lot of interesting family history places.  I'm calling it my "Where They Lived Trip".

I intend to use land records to stand in the exact spots where all the direct ancestors in my Dad's line lived.  Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia. Since my husband's family came from almost exactly the same states, I'm adding those locations to my travel list along with Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and North Carolina.  You can see that it will make a fine, long trip and a pretty big loop.

Mom and I did this on our trip-before-last to Wales.  We went to her mother's birthplace and found the house her family lived in; her father's birthplace and some of the houses he lived in.  We also added a few we weren't positive about yet, but were probabilities.  I'm still working on our Welsh line and it's probably going to the next to the last family I "finish".  (I suspect my German from Russia Grandmother will be the last.)

Back to the sorting and scanning . . .