A Tree Grew in Oakland

This past week, I had to say goodbye to an old friend – my great grandparents’ clock. It had been ticking and keeping good time since the 1880s. Long ago, thankfully, it gave up the ability to chime. It had stopped working altogether in the 1940s and was religated to the basement of my grandparents’ home. In the early 1960s, my grandfather placed a small spray can cap inside the chamber with 3-in-1 oil and let the fumes rise. It started to tick. Grandpa was happy (it belonged to his parents); Grandma was not happy since it was in her bedroom. Finally, Grandma had enough and religated it to the “clothes press” (translation, closet). Having seen the clock when my brother and I were at our grandparents’, I asked what happened to it. Grandpa, asked if I wanted it. My answer was YES. So, I took ownership of the family heirloom in the mid-1960s. It went with me to my apartment in college. It has been in my home ever since.

Last week, it stopped. It would run for an hour and stop. It was fully wound up and I have kept oil in the chamber. Maybe after about 150 years it was time to let it go. As you can see, there is damage to the base (it was like that when I got it) so, other than emotional value, there was none. My wife reminded me of all the things that did not work or had no use that each of our parents had when we had to clean our their homes. That resonated with me. Time to break the “oh, I cannot throw that out” concept. A number of years (decades) ago, I took it in to see if it could be repaired (to activate the chime). The price then was astronomical. It was time to let it go.

The concept of too much stuff that would be left for someone else to dispose really hit me. I have downloaded a number (450+) of digital books that I have used at various times in my genealogical research. They were all on CDs. As of today, they are all on a 1TB disc drive and the CDs and their cases are gone. Now all anyone had to do is hit delete on the main directory and they will have a clean 1TB external drive. [And, yes, there is still room for more]. So now I am updating my database with a full library system that tracks the digital books and where they can be found. As part of this, I am finding I have some in more than one directory, so I am also cleaning that up.

As a side benefit of all of this, I am only maintaining minimal paper copies of evidence — things are scanned and attached with full citations to my family database and I have a directory of where the images exist outside of the database. The space that used to contain all of the notebooks (14 3″ binders) opened up and I could pull some of the volumes I had stored away and put them on a shelf (like the full 24 volumes of Mayflower Families. They are up on the shelf near the ceiling, but I did buy the three volume index and keep it at a more convienent level.

So, when the time comes, a big donation to a library of the over 250 books I have purchased over the year is the task I am leaving instead of filling dumpster after dumpster (we filled 3 when we cleaned out my parents’ house)