Good morning everyone! It's a beautiful day here in Colorado, sun is shining and supposed to be 60 today. Hope you are all warm and comfortable where you're at. Okay, the Holidays are over and we look forward to some time in the house for the next couple of months. So let's get a new project started. Dick and I have been discussing getting the oral histories done and posted online. If you've read any of the ones we have at http://www.kmitch.com/Huerfano/oralhist.html then you know how interesting they are as well as how important they are to our own histories. Many of them speak of the neighbors they lived next to and give you a real good feel for the era in which they lived. So now I need some volunteers to type up the ones we still need to get online. Go through the list and see if there are any in particular that you want to type up, maybe one from your own family, and let me know. If none of them are from your family but you still want to help out just let me know and I will pick one to send to you. I will make a copy of the Interview and mail it to you and you type it up. All you need to do is look at this one: http://www.kmitch.com/Huerfano/oral54.html to see how it's done. Follow the same format. You can type it single spaced if you wish. Then you email it back to me and I'll code it and get it posted. It's just a matter of getting them typed up to put online. It would be great if we could just scan them all, put them through OCR and be done with it. But some of the copies are hand corrected or are to light to scan. IF we are able to scan one at a good resolution, we can send it to you via email. Folks please help get this project going so we can finish it and move on to the next one, which I think will be the school records. When you volunteer, please send me your name, the name of the interview you want to type, or just say ANY, and send me your home address. Also I will need to know if you are on dial up internet connection or high speed so if we can send it via email I'll know what size file you can handle coming into your inbox. So what you will be sending will be: your name mailing address name of file you want or ANY dial-up or high speed Make sure you send this information to be privately, not on the List. This way your mailing addresses are not on the List. I'll handle the rest from this end. On the really big interviews, over 30 pages, I will break them down into segments and send it to several people. That way no one is burdened with a really large one to do. I will try to keep them around 10 pages if I can. No guarantees there, but I think if we only have to do an hour or so of work at a time, everyone will get them done pretty quick. When you finish one, please let me know if you are available to do another one. I think once Dick gets back on his feet, he's been ill, he will be taking over the coordination of this project so that I can spend more time doing the coding. And Dick, please get well soon! It's up to each of you if this project gets done, so how about it folks, do you have some time to spare to volunteer? PLEASE help out on this one. If you have any questions or comments please let me know. In the meantime I have been working on de-papering this office AGAIN. Seems like it's a never ending chore (sigh). But really I have made some progress. I have gone from 11 boxes down to 3, and a couple of stacks on the desk. YAHOO. I'm putting everything into spreadsheets so that I can post it all. This covers all 4 of my Counties, Huerfano, Pueblo, Taos and Las Animas. There is a lot of data here that needs to go online for all of you to use. My dream is to have all the paper out of this office and all this data out there for you. Well maybe someday.........(grin). With your help I know I can get it done. As you know, I am now State Coordinator for New Mexico so I need to spend some time on that endeavor also. A couple of my CC's in that State have requested a new State page so I'm tossing around a few ideas for that. The other day I found a huge box of floppies and loaded up a couple hundred on to the computer to see what's there. Well I did find quite a few files that I want to get posted to our pages, so there's that to do also. So many things I want to accomplish! Anyone want to pop over here and help (LOL)? And you know I still haven't got those bedrooms painted (LOL). Well you know, come to think of it, a couple of the researchers are coming here this summer, hmmmm, gives me some great ideas (duckin n runnin). I really need some good volunteers, please let me hear from you on the Interviews project. Hugs to all, Karen