Understanding history serves many purposes. Some may study history in order to not repeat the past, like the "never again" campaign against genocide. Some may study history to better understand the present, like those who work in psychiatry. Some may study history to make progress for the future, like the inventor of penicillin did. And some study history for entertainment. Like my mother.
One of my mother's hobbies has been studying geneology and researching her family's history. She is really into it and gets very excited about finding a long lost relative's name. At some point in this quest to capture the entire family tree, my mother expanded her personal project to include creating a geneology book to share. She then decided that she needed to make books for over 50 people before she completed the first book. Her goal was to have these 50 books done before the family reunion last June. Well, she's still working on them.
This little project of hers has turned into a monster. Of course that's not the term she would probably use, she'd probably say it is a "labor of love", although I haven't heard her say that either. I call it a monster because it has taken over not only alot of time, alot of energy, and every available inch of their cabin, it has also turned into an enormous expense.
Unfortunately she attempting this "old school style" so that means cutting and pasting on paper and bringing it to "the xerox store" to get photocopies. Each page is printed on thick photo-sensitive paper and then put in a sheet protector. Because she wanted a comprehensive documentation she has more pages than she knows what to do with except to include them all. This has resulted in not just one 4-inch 3-ring binder, but a total of 3 books which are still overflowing.
I don't think she thought through the whole process before jumping into this project. Which is why everything is laid out all over the cabin floors, tables, shelves and chairs in different stages. Some pages are in protector sheets, some are just in boxes, some are combined with the page that goes on the back side (as there are 2 pages per protector sheet) and some sheets have 2 pages but they're not the correct two which means one page needs to be pulled out, possibly flipped over and it's corresponding page added.
Unfortunately it's too late to go back to the beginning and plan the whole thing out. Or to compile it electronically (don't get me started there). She has too much invested into photocopying and fancy paper to bring the one master book to the photocopier and make the set number of complete books. So instead we're piecing them together bit by bit. And I say we because this has resulted in an overwhelming amount of work for her to do on her own. So over the summer she's enlisted the help of her daughter-in-law, 3 of her grandkids, her sister-in-law, her son's mother-in-law, and me. This doesn't even count the numerous relatives who spent almost 3 days working on the books at the reunion. And they're still not close to being done (and she is planning on shipping out the miscellaneous missing pages from the books that did get brought out to the reunion once they figure out what all is missing and how many copies of each they might need because that's not even consistant).
So it was again my turn to go in and spend 8 hours trying to make a dent in all the work that still needs to be done. This is my fourth day at the cabin. It can be a hard day for me as I have a very different organizational style than my mother. But I usually have to bite the bullet because there's no turning back now and I want them to be done. So I spent the day cutting apart picture labels with an old paper cutter so they could be inserted ontop of the picture on each page of the book. There were about 10 picture labels on each piece of paper that needed to be cut apart. Not all the pictures have labels yet, but so far I counted 29 boxes of just picture label sheets. Oh, and did I say old paper cutter? Yeah, that cutter was probably 40 years old and maybe hadn't been sharpened ever, so I couldn't cut more than one or two sheets at a time. This is not my version of efficient.
I also spent time inserting pictures into 8 books because my mother prefers to work with a small number of books at a time and kinda piecemeal them together (which means when we're done they aren't really complete yet because she might have to make more photo copies of some pictures or has to type up a label here and there). Finally, I tried to help organize some of the loose pictures that end up in miscellaneaous piles around her work areas. Doing all this does not pair well with my impatient nature. So if patience is a vitue I am not virtueous at least not when it comes to this project in history. But like it or not, both my temperment and my mother's project are a part of my reality.
Photo note: Just a shot of the labels waiting to be cut apart. I like that they are lined up and all in one area.
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