Day Nineteen: "D" is for "Done"

Sometimes, they bog you down. Sometimes they speed you up. I may have spent forever—or at least a good portion of the month—deciding what to do with the contents of the "B" folders, but I'm apparently making up for it now. This is encouraging news for my flagging Fall Cleanup project.

There were only two folders in my "D" section. Neither of them was for surnames. Nor were they for topics which require a lot of consideration. This is good. I dispatched them quickly.

Of course, I can't just move on without saying just what those two folders contained. But this will be easy. Remember that most of the contents of this file cabinet was assembled in the first few emergent years of online genealogy research.

One feature of the time was the sheer enthusiasm over discovering—be that surname ever so common, like Jones, or unusual, like Taliaferro—that we could connect with fellow researchers via email. Sight unseen, family history enthusiasts were sharing notes with fellow researchers all across the country—no, make that all around the world. (I can vouch for that, having reviewed some responses from Australia and England, as well as the more commonplace Minnesota or Tennessee.)

One way these researchers were able to find each other was through electronic forums. And notes from one of those became the sole resident in my file for "D": the Delphi Forums.

Now, don't go looking for the modern-day version of the Delphi Forums. My sign-in instructions told me to access the site by using the address my.delphi.com. I tried that, just now, and didn't get anywhere, so I guess that was a website that fizzled around the time of the dot-bomb.

That was an easy journey through the file folder! I was on to "E" in no time, where the story was similar. (You can guess the same is likely to happen when I get to "X," but I was as surprised as anyone to discover I hadn't filed anything in either of these two preceding letters.)

Another forum for genealogy chatting provided the papers stuffed in my "E" folder—for an entity named, logically enough, e-Groups. This was where I met up with some Catholic researchers for Pennsylvania and Ohio, so I owe them much in helping point me in the right research direction. Still, don't think you can access their resources nowadays—unless the company which swallowed them up (Yahoo!) still makes the e-Groups archives available.

Without a second thought, I tossed all those notes in either the recycling bin or the shredder—for those pages with personal information attached.

And just like that, I'm on to the "F" folder. There, unfortunately, I won't be keeping up that brisk pace. Remember, my mother-in-law comes from the Flowers line, and there are several files to inspect, just in that one folder. This will take a while.

Above: "Boulevard Montmartre à Paris," 1897 oil on canvas by Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.