by Donna Swagerty Shreve
I started to get interested in my family’s history back in the 1960s when I watched my mother delve into our family history. My family elders were talkers and shared their stories at family gatherings over the years. I paid attention and was blessed with a good memory.
At first I bored my immediate family members with the stories I had heard in my childhood. My sons on many occasions would say, “Yes, Mom we have heard that one before.” Finally my brother devised a solution to my many repeated tellings of the family stories. It was summer time when both of us had a few months off due to our careers in public education. He invited me up to his home in Redding and told me to bring my stories and my computer.
After a week of non-stop typing, I had written down all of the various stories that I could recall from past tellings. My brother printed them out on scratch paper and it was then over 30 pages. While I was typing up stories, my brother set up a web site as an example for teachers in his district. He was in charge of computer education and wanted to actively use a possible web site for teachers to produce various classroom activities. His idea was great but he got few takers. Instead we had the beginning of a family web site. As he continued his climb up his education career ladder, the site eventually was taken down.
Not only did I have stories to tell but relatives started sharing pictures and artifacts with me as I became the one who kept track of family history. I joined several different genealogy societies and even took a week long trip to Salt Lake City to explore the wonderful library there. My various family trees were expanding in leaps and bounds. It was now suggested I write a book. I pushed back at that idea because I felt I could never be up to date on what I kept discovering and was not sure just how far I could reach with my material. I had also watched one son lighten up each time he moved. Anything extra was quickly discarded. I had no illusion about how long any book I wrote would last in my immediate family.
Again my brother came to the rescue. We decided it was time once again to create a web site. I had done a blog on my own in 2008 to chronicle a trip I took through the midwest as I traced the land owned by various relatives before everyone ended up in California. I wanted to bring along, via the blog, all of my cousins so they could share in my adventure. After I returned from the trip I continued the blog with family stories once again. That blog worked for ten years. Then Google informed me they were no longer going to support the site and I would need to find another venue.
To further my chronicling of family stories, I took a series of writing classes to improve my skills. My original intention was to clean up family stories of my ancestors. Soon my writing teacher convinced me to write my own stories as well. We all have stories to tell about our own lives. Now my collection of stories needed a place to land.
Using what worked before, I traveled to visit my brother once again so we could launch another web site. We both did research into web sites and my brother chose one based on other peoples’ feedback on reliability and easy mechanics. He learned the basics and then taught me. It took a few days but our new site was launched and we made many improvements to the original design.
We gradually improved the site as the various needs arose. We have over 300 stories and they needed to be organized. We put them first into family groups and then put the family group stories into chronological order. Pictures were uploaded and still needed to be organized as the stories are by family groups and chronological order. Family trees are expanding and have their own section. Artifacts have been recorded and are in their own section. Our family took many movies thanks to my father. The videos over the years are now available for all to enjoy. As I interviewed various family members, I tried to record the session to insure accuracy. The recordings also give that special gift of hearing a long gone loved one’s voice. To help put various ancestors into perspective, individual time lines have been created and shared. Finally there is a section for blogs which is growing each week. My brother and his wife were given a Christmas present that is a service that gives them a weekly prompt. They then send in the essay along with pictures and at the end of the year, all of stories will be returned in a book. Those weekly stories are added each week to the blog.
What has happened with the blog is surprising. I have connected with relatives I was not aware existed or were even following us. There are also people who are following us from around the world that are not even related. We do have to pay an annual fee and we are on our second year’s subscription. Hopefully the web site can continue after we are both gone. I also wish there will be other contributors who continue the family stories and history. Check us out at: swagertystories.com.
941 words
6/15/21
Swagerty-Aldrich Family Web Site 