Finally caught up with converting Mom's transcriptions of Grandma's diaries, so now there's a full twenty years worth, from 1948 to 1967, with an index. I haven't even read them all yet, but I've gotten through most of them and I think they're extremely interesting, even the ones from before I was born. I'm still trying to figure out why Scott isn't that interested in any of them from before he came along in 1971, since it seems like if you start with your own birth you're kind of jumping in the middle of the story. 1948 is actually an interesting place to begin because it was the first year where Grandma used a wheelchair, at least once in a while. It's hard to visualize the setting, since Mom was in Kindergarten then, for pete's sake, Grandma was walking, Grandpa was still alive, but the diligent reader is rewarded with a neat composite picture of life in central Illinois in the middle part of the century. 20 years later, at the end of 1967, Mom and Dad are married with two kids and have moved 30 miles away, but there seems to be more going on than ever.



Maybe the question is not so much why isn't Scott more interested but rather why am I so interested to begin with? It's true that the older you get the more you feel the weight of history, and having kids too gives you a connection to the future that makes you predisposed to exploring the past. But its like being able to read a biography that involves your own family, I mean how cool is that? It makes me wish Grandma Bartlett had done the same thing so that both sides of the family could be equally represented. For years while Grandma was still alive everyone was aware of her knowledge of family history and the need to transcribe as much of it as we could, I know Carol Pickering did some of that, and I still have an audio tape that I did with Grandma I think in '94, where she delves into some of the ancient history, particularly on the Cantrall side. Mom's got a pile of old pictures, many that we went through as kids where Grandma told us who they were and we wrote the names on the back. The names are a help, but don't always equate to knowing who the people actually were, of course, but its a start. I'd like to get a little more of that kind of thing up here with the diaries at some point, but for now if I can just keep up with the new installments as Mom types them up that will be good. She thinks at some point she'll stop, that maybe after the '70's they won't be that interesting, because they're more recent history that everyone already remembers, but we won't know until we get there.