Change

One item, not mentioned below, is the blank book "The History of Our Family." It's a blank book with places for me to hand-write about my family. I really wanted to do this, but my blog has now taken the place of a family book. 

This is not a post about genealogy, but a post about how fast things are changing in this digital world. I am cleaning my house. Not just vacuuming, but taking everything off of every shelf, cleaning, reorganizing, and recycling. I am having fun as I have found old postcards, books with inscriptions from family members, and more genealogical treasures. However, I am amazed at how many items on my bookshelf have become unnecessary in such a short period. Here are just a few:

• Travel Books and Maps - I took three trips last summer and never used travel books or maps. 

• Magazines - I found a stack of Ancestry.com magazines and a National Geographic (1981) that had wonderful pictures of Ireland. I read very few magazines. I saved these for content, but it's now content that I can find on the Internet. 

• CDs - I was so excited to receive my 1880 United States Census and National Index twelve years ago. Now, it's much easier to search at Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org for census records than to search through all of those CDs. 

• Reference Books - Grammar handbooks, a medical dictionary, and a world almanac are all things that I haven't used in many years. Google is my friend. J

• User's Guides - The last item is my Pack-Mate Users Guide that I received with my first computer in 1988. The Guide has over 120 pages. The computer had MS-DOS and 1 MB of RAM. At that time, you definitely needed a manual. 

Diana

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