Monday, August 14, 2006

Getting Ready for New England

We are getting ready for our trip to New England next week. I have the new AAA books, made the hotel , car and plane reservations, dug out my map collection and picked the ones I need to take, etc. We went to MA, NH and ME in 1990, 1991, 1994 and 2004 (twice), and saw the cousins in Salem NH, Westford MA and my 89 year old aunt and her husband in Maine.

The main reason we are going is because dear Aunt Gerry said "I really need you to come see me again." She has been a major contributor to the knowledge base for my father's family, and has a treasure trove of pictures and stories. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's two years ago, and seems a bit more confused now. But the long term memory is still there, and that's what I hope to tap on this trip. The cousins are fun to be with, although we lost one cousin's husband in the spring.

I'm still stuck on just how much genealogy "stuff" I should take to the cousins and my aunt. In 2004, I took them each a copy of my book "The Ancestors of Benjamin Seaver (1791-1825) and His Seaver Descendants." They seemed impressed, and opined that it will sure make a good paperweight in the bookcase. I told them they could use it for an insomnia attack cure.

But that limb of my Seaver family tree is only 1/16 of my New England ancestry, and they haven't seen the rest of the database. Although it is still in a state of change, I'm creating ancestry books for my grandparents, Fred Walton Seaver (1876-1942) and Alma Bessie Richmond (1882-1962), using the Ahnentafel report option in Family TreeMaker. I'll stick an Introduction and a cover sheet on them and save them as PDF files. It isn't perfect, but they'll do for now. I will then put them on CD-ROMs to give to each cousin who wants one. If they want a printed copy, they can make one. These are not thin tomes - the Seaver one is over 600 pages, and the Richmond one is about 300 pages.

I realized that they may not have all of the family pictures that I have, so I'm printing up about 10 of the family shots in 8 x 10 size to show to everybody. And I will add these photos to the CD-ROM also, plus the rest of my photos for this side of the family.

Some of my cousins have lost the family newsletters I have been writing since 1988 and sending as Christmas gifts since. I have these files since 1992, so I cleaned up the document files a bit and created PDFs of them, and they'll be on the CD-ROM also.

Lastly, I am taking two pictures of "unknown females" in the hope that someone can identify them positively.

My hope is that I will have some time to view their photo albums again and be able to take better digital photos of their photos for my collection. I need to practice taking photos of photos sometime soon .

We fly into Manchester NH, will spend several days in Salem NH, then on to Aunt Gerry's in Augusta ME, over through western ME and NH to eastern VT, down the Conn river and back across Mass to Westford MA before we get back to Manchester NH.

Does anyone have any great places to sightsee along this path or don't-miss restaurants in these places? Tell me!!

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