is back finally. And at the new blog home.
I have been busy getting stories in order so they can be posted on the website. I started with John and Alvina (Williams Davis) Jones, and I'm continuing with their son Frank and his wife Lizzie (Worth) Jones.
It's been a great two weeks, actually, for my family history work. In 1979 I sat down at the kitchen table of my parent's house in Sargent, Nebraska, and visited on tape with my grandma, Lizzie. When I post the Frank and Lizzie story, it will come with a slight disclaimer. While we visited, mom and dad were in the house but not at the table. At one point, and I can't remember where, mom shook her head "no" behind grandma, when she was telling me something. Grandma was 91 when we were talking, so it's possible - likely - that some things she remembered weren't quite accurate. And that's not judgement talking. That's me, with a poor memory, knowing that the stories I know for a fact may not have happened quite the way I remember them. Do we discount everything she said? No, absolutely not. The facts can be discovered in documents. The stories she remembers are based in her memories with maybe the details mixed up a bit.
Whatever the case, it has been great to "visit" with her again and hear her voice. She died in 1985 at age 96.
I love technology and although it's been around for a long time now, I still find myself in awe of it sometimes. The invention of magnetic tape and recorders was a wonderful thing. And now the ability to copy those voices from tape to digital is equally wonderful. My son-in-law Tim downloaded Audacity for me and supplied a cable to go from the tape player I thankfully had not Goodwill-ed to my computer. After one side of the tape was copied, the end of the tape came off the reel. The website <Instructibles> gave clear directions about how to take apart and fix a broken tape. Then when I was back in business and got the second side digitized, I was able to use Audacity again to reduce the noise and improve the quality of the recording.
I wanted to transcribe the tape and so got a free 7-day trial to Transcribe, a Chrome app. I will go back to them again when I go back through one of the tapes of my visiting with dad. A yearly subscription is only $20. If you are ever transcribing something, this makes it so easy.
I have to say also that anyone with old tapes of interviews should never throw them away just because they have been digitized. Audacity worked great, but it didn't pick up some of the words. So I went back to the tape in the player and listened again, and I was able to pick up the words that were not audible in the digital copy. The story I was able to complete this way adds to the sense of what Lizzie's life was like in the 1890s.
