I just got back from the SOHO Apple store, where I took a One-to-One session on how to use my new iPhone 5S. I am not the type to run out and buy the latest thing just to have it, but the Hayfoot especially need a new phone. I got them early Friday morning and am now realizing how fortunate I was to get them when I did, especially with the her coming home for the weekend and going back to DC today. It was almost too easy; I was in and out of the store in all of 45 minutes, counting the brief wait outside the store. This is my first iPhone and am trying to make the most of it, especially for the blog. I want to take better photos and incorporate sounds and video into my oeuvre. I am really excited about the phone but must say it was a little sad retiring my old flip phone, which was so old but served me so well for so many years. Putting it in the drawer felt like a betrayal.

Over the weekend I received the above worksheets from a relative of mine who I have never met but contacted recently to see what information he might have about our family history. I knew who he was because a mutual relative. To be precise, my grandmother was his aunt. He, his brothers, my dad and his brothers grew up in Boston together in the 1940s-1960s. This information is a coup for me; not only does it corroborate some of the work I have already done, it adds a great deal I did not know. This is information that even my father did not know. I am sure of that because he would have shared it with me when we sat down in the late 1990s and hashed out the family tree to the best of his knowledge a few years before he died. Now I am trying to flesh out the details of this new stuff I have. It is my goal to become a professional-level genealogist and learn about standards, levels of proof, and that type of thing. Between this and what I received from an aunt on my mother’s side a few weeks back, I have got a lot of material to work with in the coming weeks. It is going to be a busy fall with this and everything else.