Dear Folks, For many hours these past two days, I was so tempted to come up with a meaningful story that would cover what I transcribed out of the Proceedings of School District No. Three ,of Towns of Lewiston and Porter, Niagara County, New York, 1819-1872, but it knew that I would have to start from scratch all over again. But oh wait a minute. I knew that about 10 years ago shortly after I transcribed the records, I was asked to give a talk to the Town of Porter Historical Society on the subject of School District. No. Three. Therefore I only had to dig up the speech that I had entered into my computer and post the whole nine yards to you. It was the ultimate synopsis of the records. So early last evening I searched all my computer files, couldn't find my speech whatsoever and then I had to resort to digging into every file folder that I may have filed it in. I could even "see" it. It had been printed off from my computer and I had folded it into thirds to stick in my purse for the meeting. I could still see the creases on it. NONE of the file folders yielded anything and so I tackled the stack of email documents and stories that I've stored in a storage box. I leafed through everything and still couldn't find my speech. I even checked to see if I had tucked my speech into the spiral-bound version of the entire transcription of the school records. Nothing. Note: By this time I was more than JUST a bit obsessive/compulsive. So once again this evening I went through the whole routine again. Nothing. Absolutely NOTHING! I couldn't believe that I could have just discarded a speech I had made to the Historical Society. In an absolutely LAST ditch effort I turned again to my spiral-bound transcription of the school records and looked at it more closely. And there it WAS! I had inserted my speech as a forward to the transcript! There it was! So for the rest of the evening I scanned my speech into my OmniPro OCR reader and finally saved it satisfactorily to disk. As a result, I believe you might be interested in my speech/synopsis of the old school records. The records are not only important to the history of our town but of the genealogy of it as I interpreted it at the time. I'll post the speech in several segments. Please bear in mind that you won't have a clue as to where either schoolhouse was located but I'm certain that many of the members of the historical society knew precisely what I was talking about. Part I tomorrow. vee