We Get a Computer!

When my babies entered first grade, I suddenly had more free time on my hands, other than time spent volunteering at their school.  I decided it was time to get back to genealogy.  So off to my local Family History Center I went.  Some things had changed since I left it in 1987, after my Aunt Elsie had passed away.  Computers had come onto the scene, and I was clueless.  With the help of the volunteers at my local Family History Center, I began entering my data into PAF.  At long last, I knew what computers would be useful for!

Finally, in early 1995, we were ready!  We had spent the previous few months window shopping and studying out what we thought we wanted.  A friend of ours built computers in his spare time, so we parted with our $$ and had him build us our first computer.  At the same time I ordered PAF 2.1, which was a DOS-based program and cost $30.  I happily began entering my previous research into PAF, thinking that would be about all I could do with a computer, other than word documents, etc.

My brother, who has been my computer guru for these sixteen plus years, told us we needed the Internet.  He got us signed up with Prodigy.  For our money, we got either 5 or 10 hours of online time a month, and I can’t remember now for sure what we paid, but I think it was about $10 a month.  One night, trying to figure out what to do with “The Internet,” I got the brilliant idea to see what I could find by typing the word “genealogy” into the Prodigy search box.

What I got was a whole world of genealogy Message Boards!  I decided to tackle some of my “dead-end” families by perusing the Message Boards, then posting my own messages.  I seriously wanted to find out more about my gg grandmother, Mary Millet, who had married my gg grandfather, Samuel Henry Johnson, then apparently died shortly after the birth of my great grandfather.  I crafted a query containing what little I knew about her, and was pleasantly surprised to get an answer from someone who was researching her own Millet line, although she wasn’t sure if it was the right one or not.  She snail-mailed me photocopies of the research she had done which fit into my family, and gave me plenty to think about as she suddenly opened up a whole new family for me.  Unfortunately, after about a year of correspondence, she gave up her research to have one of those “surprise” babies, born some 14 years after her last daughter.  A few years ago I wrote to her mailing address to let her know what I had found since then, but never got a reply.  I hope one day she’ll find her way back to research—she was a darn good researcher and I miss her insights, even after all these years.  It’s time to write again, this daughter ought to be a teen-ager by now.

The second thing I wanted to find was my husband’s Allen family.  His parents had researched to no avail, in an attempt to get further back than the little bit of information they had on two generations.  Lester Otis Allen was my husband’s grandfather, he had deserted his family when my father-in-law was very young and any family members who knew anything about him refused to divulge that information.  Lester’s father was Newton Allen, and that’s about all they knew.  I posted to the Allen Message Board on Prodigy and voila!  Someone had a book (The Allen Family, Descendants of John and Amy Cox Allen) and my father-in-law was in the book!  So was his whole Allen family plus other lines, clear back to 1694!  I bought the book, my first genealogy-related purchase (other than the PAF software).  Best $40 I ever spent!

A year later my brother decided we needed the “real” Internet, which was a good thing, since clearly the time limitations put on us by our Prodigy plan were not enough anymore.  Enter Rootsweb’s mailing lists (where I “met” cousins who took my Johnson’s back to 1600 for me);  a Kansas history mailing list, where I was invited to participate in the USGenWeb Project in July 1996; and more.  In 1996 there was very little genealogy data online.  I feel fortunate to have discovered Internet Genealogy back in its beginning stages, so I’ve had time to grow with it.  Not sure how well I’d be able to grasp all that is there for us now, if I were just beginning my online research.  MUCH easier in small bites!

Next:  What I know, don’t know, and want to know about Jonathan Millet.