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I have called this OUR FAMILY TREASURY because I created it as a place to store treasure for my grandchildren and their progeny - the greatest treasure that I can give them is my knowledge about their predecessors. This material comprises my family history research. It was assembled, compiled and indexed during the thirty-four year period from 1984 through 2018. Additionally, it contains photographs and document images, as well as autobiographical and biographical material, about me and my immediate family. In 1984, I began doing family history research, motivated by an interest in finding a myriad of details I wondered about concerning my predecessors. In the intervening years I have found a great deal of information and assembled over sixteen thousand documents about these people. Now, at age 86, I realize all this data still presents only the barest outline of these people's lives and there are many interesting facts and details that will never be found. It has also become obvious in the past ten years that our society is changing in ways that will make it increasingly more difficult in the future to find and assemble this kind of information about people. Privacy concerns and legislation preventing access to what used to be public records, increasingly will prevent people in the future from being able to find the kind of information I have found. Additionally, current generations are more mobile than those in the past and fewer really permanent records (e.g., those that will be saved and made freely accessible more than a hundred years from now) are being accumulated about people. The widespread use of computer records, instead of permanent paper records, is decreasing the chances of future researchers finding the kind of data I have been able to assemble; many, if not most, of these computer records will be purged long before anyone expresses an interest in finding and/or saving them. It is a reality of life that unless you become famous or notorious for one reason or another, authors have little interest in creating a written record of the interesting, let alone the mundane, aspects of your life. One can write an autobiography, but if authors have no interest in writing about you, it is unlikely anyone will have much interest in reading your autobiography! I have been an saver/accumulator all my life and I have kept a great many things relative to my life and experiences, as well as those of others, - documents and photographs that someone will have to face discarding some day. Unless assembled and explained in some coherent manner, much of this material is meaningless to anyone other than me. So at age 63, and as time and interest permitted, I decided to bring this data about my life and experiences, as well as what I know about the other members of our family, together in one place where it can be readily searched and located. This material has been enhanced with explanations and insight, and undocumented details and facts that I am able to provide to future generations - the kind of details and explanations I wished could find to fill in the gaps in my research of my predecessors! Much of this material has been assembled in modules, referred to throughout as infobases, with a separate infobase dealing with separate subjects or components of the story of each individual. Infobases about each individual in our family are grouped with the caption Chapters in Dow Family History. Infobases about my life are headed with the caption Reflections on My Life and Times. Most of the infobases included on the companion sites (see LINKS page), are those about people who are no longer living, under the caption Chapters in Dow Family History.
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