Documenting History

How would you like to read your grandparents' thoughts while they went through the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic or your parents during World War II or anyone during the Civil War? Wouldn't that be amazing? I'm not aware of anything my ancestors wrote down during these times. Most people think their thoughts are not important enough to write down and that their lives were mundane and boring. I know my mother said that, despite being a teenager during World War II. These events were big parts of history. The current COVID-19/Coronavirus/SARS-CoV2 pandemic is history in the making. You are living through a major event in history. Document it!

Grandma Panther's Diaries

During my last trip to Iowa, I was able to scan in three more volumes of my grandmother's diaries that my aunt has. I posted the scans online privately for my cousins to browse. One cousin made a comment, at least half joking, that he couldn't believe he had to click a link for each and every page, asking what it would cost to have it on paper.

More Diaries Scanned

During my latest trip to Iowa, I was able to scan in every page of three of my grandmother, Elizabeth Menke Panther's diaries. This is my mother's mother. These were from the years 1968, 1973 and 1977. Now that I'm home, I working on getting the pdfs created with these scans turned into jpg files and cropping them down to the individual pages. While cropping them, I'm scanning them for important events. I know I'm not catching all of them this time through. I'll look through them more thoroughly once I get them organized. Still, a couple of very important events leaped out at me from 1968. Add in the fact that this was 50 years ago and these take on greater significance.

Old Diaries

I'm confident that all genealogists would love to get their hands on old diaries and journals of their ancestors'. My mother loaned me the diaries of my grandmother, Elizabeth Menke Panther from 1975, 1976 and 1980. I just looked through the one from 1975 and discovered several entries that help fill in a few blanks in my genealogy database.

Her brother, Joseph Menke died at 1:30pm on February 23, 1975