Sunday, June 26, 2011

Now What Do I Do? Or, the Day My Internet Went Down!

Last Thursday afternoon I tried to log on to my computer to check email and tech support email. Alas! No connectivity! I rebooted my modem (that usually works) and when it finished going through all its motions, I noticed my Internet light was off. Mostly I would do mundane household chores, checking back every 30 minutes or so. I worked on my quilt squares until about 11, when I decided to check one more time. Nope--not working yet. Off to bed I went, thinking of places I could take my laptop the next day to at least download email.

Fortunately, it was up again when I checked the next morning. Later in the day my ISP sent an email explaining the situation--a construction worker cut a Qwest cable the previous afternoon, knocking out the dsl lines for all of Infinity Internet customers. Nice to know it wasn't just me that suffered.

But this prompted me to try to remember what I did before computers and the Internet.

I spent a lot of time at my kids' school, volunteering in their classrooms and the media center, going on field trips and helping with other activities there. My house was cleaner. I sewed more. I knitted more. I cooked more. I did more cross-stitch projects. I bowled on a league once a week. I was just getting back into genealogy research again, after one of many brief hiatus's while raising 6 kids.

We got our first computer in January 1995. The Internet as we know it today was in its infancy. My brother insisted I needed the Internet, although I didn't know why I would need it. He signed me up for Prodigy--with a limit of about 10 hours a month (I could easily spend that much time in a day without even trying). I got the brilliant idea one evening to see what might be "online" for genealogy. Prodigy had Message Boards for surnames and locations, so I looked for a few of the surnames I was interested in. "Millet" was one. My gg grandmother Mary Millet married my gg grandfather Samuel Henry Johnson in Jo Daviess Co. IL in 1843, but that was about all I knew of her. I soon "met" another lady researching the same line in the same place. I "met" one of my current Facebook friends (Ray Justus) on the Prodigy Message Boards, thanks to Char Maloney. We posted back and forth, and I went over my allotted 10 hours a month several times--and had to pay extra for it, too. Also on the Prodigy Message Boards I found my husband's Allen family--something his parents were unsuccessful at in 35+ years of searching--thanks to a gentleman in Austin TX who just happened to have a book on our family.

That was all it took! I had started my research back in 1968 as a new mother of a newborn baby girl--thanks to an aunt who had done a family history of sorts while her aunts and uncles were still living. I worked at it off and on while raising all those kids--but once I discovered what was available online (albeit NOTHING like what's available today), I was hooked for good!

Next up: The birth of the USGenWeb Project, and more!