You may have read in our newsletter, or in the NetPlus Alliance blog that we are putting together a book that is both a company and family business history book. Our company started as a machine shop in the late 1800’s, and my daughter, Jennifer Judge Murphy is now the fifth-generation president. We have been working on the book for a year with the help of a local author, and the book should be finished by December.
The point of this article is to remind you to gather your history before it is too late. Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles to get as much information on early generations that they can recall: full names, maiden names, birthdates/places, wedding dates, place/dates of deaths, children’s names, etc. Record this carefully, and dig as far back as you can. I use Ancestry.com to use as our repository for this history. Once you start uploading information, this website finds additional information by revealing census data, military records, and sometimes the history that other distant family relatives may have entered. For example, I learned that my great-grandfather, Daniel Delahunt, had two brothers that were killed in the Civil War.
Depending on your page, you may have family and company photos and articles. What I discovered as we were looking for photos for the book is that many of the photos were not labeled: no names, dates, and or locations. Fortunately, I have a 94-year-old cousin, Sam Ward, who was a great help in making identifications, and creating anecdotes. So, get out those boxes of old pictures, and start organizing them. Your children will appreciate it.
I’ll leave it up to the younger readers of this post to tell us how they are cataloging the thousands of pictures they are taking on their phones. I still print the ones I want to save.