Pages and pages of all those family names!

It sounded like such a simple project. I'd gather together all the family stories and bits of history scattered through several file drawers and boxes, add to them special photos selected from a large collection and put it all into family history notebooks for Christmas presents for three of my adult grandsons Kyle Utterback, and Brinton and Ty Cary.

Weeks of sorting, assembling, copying, meeting with one grandson's other grandmother for info and details and hours of writing later I hadn't begun to make a dent in the project and it was only a week until Christmas. What to do? Panic is always my first choice, but this time I actually had a good helping of common sense and realized it was not doable in so short a time. So, I put the notebooks together with the information that was ready, or near ready, and was quite pleased to see that the four inch ring binders were about a quarter full. Plenty of room for the heaps of material still to be prepared. So the boys received a "Christmas present in progress" this year and one of my major goals for 2012 is to finish this project!

Amazingly, with all that work I didn't empty a single box, file drawer or photo album!  There is much left to do. Part of the reason for my inability to complete the project in time---aside from my lifelong habit of underestimating the time and energy it will take to complete any project---was that meeting with the other grandmother. Our mutual grandson has fascinating ties to Oregon's early history and I did get a little sidetracked (let's say most of one week) researching and enjoying learning about our state's history that I had never known before. There's a museum in Prineville, Oregon that I must visit now, and the frustrating thing is that I spent a whole weekend in that town, driving back and forth past that very museum, just weeks before I learned of my grandson Kyle's connection to Crook County history.

If you're still reading, here's the major points in his family history: One of his ancestor grandfathers, John Turley Crooks,  represented Linn County in the legislature when they wrote the state constitution in a single month, and his son, Aaron Crooks was murdered in the Prineville area setting off a rugged vigilante "war" that is about as "Wild West" story as one can imagine. The story is easily found on the Internet.

But, any of you reading this because you're one of my Elting, Smith, Carlisle, etc. relatives---these Crooks are not our relatives. They are my grandson's paternal family members. He has, besides all of our relatives, the whole Utterback, Vibbert, Crooks, Friend lines and many more in his genealogy.

Lucky for me, these young men are interested in all this material I'm giving to them. Nothing better than having the next generation realize the importance of FAMILY.