"Now Get That Dad of Yours....."

Lester and Ed got together in 1903 and remembered their grandfather, a soldier of the Revolution, and their other ancestors. Some of what they remembered was true, and some perhaps was not. Ed thought it was important and urged Lester's daughter Altha to record the history. "Now get that Dad of yours to give you the history of the Browns before it is everlastingly too late," he wrote. She did. I always imagine her sitting by his bedside writing down his words, but I don't really know whether he was bedridden at the time.

Ed went to visit Altha and her husband after Lester died, and copied the family history into a notebook. He wrote some facts of his branch of the family and a timeline of his own life, copied from old diaries, and went on to record the activities of some of his later years day by day. He lived until 1935. Then his daughter Mabel put the old notebook with some of the other papers she had. Her husband died the same year. She uprooted herself from her Wisconsin home, eventually settling in Long Beach California. The notebook and some of her other old treasures found a home in the garage of her son Roger, my father. There I found it, in 1992. My father had never been interested in it, but he did manage to preserve it well. How lucky we were that the garage never leaked or was infested with mice!