Everything Ellis: They are DONE!!!!

Anyone that has talked to me for very long in the last few months knows I've been working on a HUGE geneaology project for about 5 months. I took all of my mother-in-law's histories and wanted to organize them into a binder for her (and for me too.) Well---the project sort of grew into something WAY more than I had intended it to be.

It all started with Shawnee's school project. It needed to be on South Africa. Well, I remembered that Garrin had relatives from South Africa and asked to borrow his Mom's history. It was purple typing---the kind that you can hardly read and it was in bad shape. We decided to re-do that history (80 pages) and it took off from there. That history alone ended up taking 20 hours just to read and edit. My mom was kind enough to scan in the histories for me...so that shaved off tons of hours, days, weeks, months! We only had to type up a couple of them..but had lots of formatting and editing to do. We changed fonts, margins, and read every comma, period and misspelled word. Every Sunday (and lots of my days off) I would yell--"Who is going to read to me today" which was followed by groans a lot of the time. But they did read, and we did get it done!

A few funnies....after reading so long....it becomes second nature to read with commas and periods. Kaylee has been doing summer packets for school and went upstairs to read her world civilization book and started reading it with commas, periods and "new line" (which we would say at the beginning of each new paragraph). It was funny. Hard to switch your mind off something like that. I teased Shawnee because she read "the bid-hop went to the whale that was 70-hundred feet" and I said the whata whata? It was the bishop went to the well that was 7000 feet. So we joke about that a lot now too. It was a great experience and we felt a lot closer to relatives as we learned about their lives.

So here is the growing part. I wanted to make 2 sets of books---one for us, and one for Garrin's parents. So that is 4 books total as I split up his mom and dad's side of the family. THEN...I thought it would be nice to do one for his sibling that we have for Christmas. We're up to 6. THEN I found out that our family reunion needed an auction item...so we're up to 8. THEN...I thought it would be nice to do one for Aunt Marilyn since she helped me with pictures and I knew she would love it...so we did a grand total of 9 books. Each one is different on the cover. The auction book was a combined book...so there are only 8 physical books. We are SO glad to have them done...and they were a HIT at the reunion.

This is the one I made for our family.