Precious Memories

Back in mid 2005, around the time I started the Descendants of Mandi website, my grandmother Elnora Evans and her husband Mr. Cleave Evans were living in the downstairs apartment of the house I own. My two daughters Chelsea and Lindsay are among those rare people who got the chance to live with their great-grandparents.

My youngest daughter Lindsay, who was two at the time, was a frequent visitor downstairs, and I can honestly say that my grandmother really enjoyed having Lindsay (one of her three great-grand daughters) so close that she could see her almost every day.

Lindsay would often disappear downstairs for hours at a time, sometimes falling asleep in grandmas bed, other times hijacking one of their TVs to watch Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. Another trick was to go downstairs and have another breakfast, lunch or dinner with grandma and grandpa after eating a complete meal upstairs with us.

On this particular day, we had just finished breakfast and Lindsay was waiting to get her hair combed (which she hates by the way). All of a sudden, she ran to the door and disappeared downstairs, calling up “I’m going down to see Grandma and Cleave!”

I’m not sure what made me do it, but something made me grab the camera and follow her down. It didn’t take me long to figure out why she had decided to come down… the smell of pancakes and bacon was wonderful, and Lindsay had decided that it was a good day for a second breakfast. I turned the camera on just as Lindsay was settling onto the little red stepping stool that all of us in the family call “Grandma’s kid chair.”

What followed were three magical minutes of Lindsay, who could barely talk, eating and chatting with her great-grandparents, with the two of them understanding every word that she said…

I took the video and then filed it away, giving digital copies of it to a few members of the family, but otherwise not really giving it a second thought.

My grandmother, Elnora Evans passed away about two years later, in 2007 at 92 years of age. Her husband Cleave Evans, passed away this past summer (August 2009). When Grandpa Evans passed, I remembered the video of them with Lindsay and became obsessed with finding it. The problem is that four years and three hard drive crashes later, I had no idea if it even existed any more. I also had forgotten what the exact name of the file was and I had no idea where I had stored it. I searched for it last summer to no avail. I got busy in the fall and decided to postpone my search until Christmastime when I’d have the time to do a thorough search.

When Christmas came, I re-started my search by loading and viewing all the burned CDs of miscellaneous pictures, digital images and saved files that we’d stored away in the past few years. Nothing. I searched the hard drives of my father’s and my mother-in-law’s computers because I’d given them digital copies. Nothing. I looked on my own external hard drives…NOTHING!

I did, however, find a clue on my dad’s computer, a shortcut icon that contained the actual name of the file: MVI_1960.AVI –which was the object of my quest. My dad had saved a shortcut, but the original file had long since been deleted so the shortcut now pointed at nothing. I took that bit of information and did a more thorough search of the thousands of files stored on my external HD… eventually VOILA! It popped up. It brought a tear to my eye when I finally got to view the scene of Lindsay’s breakfast with grandma and grandpa again.

To protect it for posterity, I uploaded a copy to YouTube, and made additional copies on my other computers as well as my online digital storage space mobileme.com.

Here’s my advice. Digital files are very vulnerable to disk failures, hard drive crashes and all manner of technical calamity, not to mention fire or other natural disaster. Be sure to provide multiple backups for ALL of your digital pictures and videos; fires, floods and earthquakes DO happen when you least expect them, not to mention the dreaded hard drive or system failures that we all experience every once in a while.

I got lucky… and I learned my lesson. The result of my luck is that Lindsay will one day be able to look back as an adult, and see the video images of herself smiling and laughing with her great grandparents in video taken by chance on a Saturday morning in 2005 when she was 2 & ½ years old.

That’s A PRECIOUS MEMORY.

Holidays: Time to build yourself a History

With Christmas time upon us, I'd like to urge all Williams-Rivers Family members to take a few minutes and talk to your parents and grandparents... our family elders. You never know what you might discover.

A good chunk of the information in this website was sourced through conversations with family members at birthday celebrations, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving Dinners. For me, one of the most valuable sources of information was my grandmother Elnora Evans. She was born Elnora Fouse in Haywood County near Brownsville Tennessee in 1914 and she married into the Williams-Rivers Family in 1935 when she married my grandfather Lemuel Williams. Although their marriage only lasted a few years, she remained close with the family and kept up with births, deaths, marriages and relocations of many family members. Although the family reunion booklets provided the structure that this website's family tree was built on, it was my grandmother Elnora's stories and recollections that gave much of it life for me.

She provided me with explanations for many of the links in the family where her family (the Fouse-Lee Family of Haywood County / Borownsville) had married into the Williams-Rivers Family producing "double cousins" who we see at reunions on both sides of the family. Her insights were invaluable to me as I began to piece things together and to fully understand the magnificent richness and heritage that we all share.

I thank God now for the many hours that we spent talking in 2005 and 2006...and I am sad that I did not have the presence of mind to engage a tape or digital recorder during our conversations. Her insights, wisdom and knowledge are silent now--we lost her earlier this year after a brief illness, at 92 years old.

Strangely enough, though, I feel her presence in the pages of this website, in some of my notes and recollections about family members. It was always her hope that I would one day make a website for the Fouse-Lee Family as well. I still hope to do so one day...and when I do, her stories, recollections and humor will all be waiting, stored in these gedcom files...waiting for one of her great neices or nephews or perhaps one of her great-granddaughters to stumble across it and want to know more about the woman whose memory was so sharp, well into her nineties that she could, with her words bring her two sisters, who died as children, back to life, so that we would all remember them, and know that they had once walked and played upon this earth.

Talk to your elders this holiday season, ask them to tell you about a family member who you never met. Don't forget to write it down...or better yet grab a tape recorder.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.