Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  This week, let’s write about “My memories of the decade of my choice.”  Choose ten years and write about your memories.

Like Randy at Genea-Musings, I’m going to start with the 70s. I’m picking this decade because I have more distinct memories from this decade than from any other.

While I have memories of my senior prom and graduation, another memory is stronger. My high school had an open lunch and I had English right after morning break making it prior to lunch. One day in May, a debater stood up prior to class and said we should all go to Commercial street during lunch and join in the protest that would be occuring at that time. While I don’t remember the exact day, I’m guessing it was after May 4th. In other words, it was after Kent State. That was my introduction to the politics of the Vietnam War.

When it came time to enroll in college, I remember a discussion with my father about my major and the classes I would take. While he gave in and let me enroll in an American history class, he would not let me major in history. Even though I enjoy the historical aspect of family history research, I found I did not like college history classes. My father had a better understanding of my aptitudes and thus pushed me towards the sciences.

It was during my time as a lab assistant for college chemistry II that I was introduced to a computer. The chemistry department shared a small computer with the math department. Several of my fellow lab assistants were taking a computer class where they learned to program a computer with punch cards. Fortunately for me, one of them had learned to use this small computer and taught me how to program it. Little did I know that 24 years of my career would be spent with computers either supporting the high school’s network or manipulating lots of student data for state reporting.

It was in those chemistry halls that I met my husband who was also a lab assistant. We both graduated with degrees in physical science education (think chemistry and physics).

To allow family to only make one trip to Emporia, we were married the day after graduation.

That fall, my husband would begin what became a 42 year career of teaching chemistry and physics at Nemaha Valley High School (now called Nemaha Central High School). While Nemaha Valley wasn’t among the smallest schools in Kansas, it did not have a need for two chemistry teachers. Thus, I started my chemistry teaching career at Centralia and Frankfort High Schools. Two years later, I was able to join my husband at Nemaha Valley by branching out and teaching biology.

Knowing that either my husband or myself needed to branch out into a different area, I elected to pursue a master’s degree in librarianship. It was while working on my masters that I discovered I like ‘information retrieval’ or in today’s terms searching / researching. I would wait 7 years after obtaining my degree in librarianship before leaving the biology classroom to become the school librarian.

About the time I finished my library degree, my grandmother asked me to help her find where her grandmother was buried. Thus, my venture into genealogy started duirng the decade of the 70s.

The late 70’s also saw the introduction of the first computers, Pets, into the high school. While I didn’t teach the computer class, I learned to use these and spent several snow days entering the biology inventory into the computer.

Even though the 70s are mostly memories, they’ve had a huge impact on my life today.