In 1984, I began doing family history research, motivated by an interest in finding a myriad of details I wondered about concerning my predecessors. In the intervening years I have found a great deal of information and assembled over fifteen thousand documents about these people. This data still presents only the barest outline of these people's lives and there are many interesting facts and details that will never be found.

      It has also become obvious that our society is changing in ways that will make it increasingly more difficult in the future to find and assemble this kind of information about people. Privacy concerns and legislation preventing access to what used to be public records, increasingly will prevent people in the future from being able to find the kind of information I have found.

      Additionally, current generations are more mobile than those in the past and fewer really permanent records (e.g., those that will be saved and made freely accessible more than a hundred years from now) are being accumulated about people. The widespread use of computer records, instead of permanent paper and microfilm records, is decreasing the chances of future researchers finding the kind of data I have been able to assemble; many, if not most, of these computer records will be purged long before anyone expresses an interest in finding and/or saving them.

      I have been a saver/accumulator all my life and I have kept a great many things relative to my life and experiences - documents and photographs that someone will have to face discarding some day. Unless assembled and explained in some coherent manner, much of this material would be meaningless to anyone other than me. I have brought this data about my life and experiences together here in one place where it can be readily found and searched. It contains mundane details and explanations I wished I could have found to fill in the gaps in my research of my predecessors.

      This material has been assembled in over four hundred-fifty modules (29,050+ pages), referred to throughout as infobases/books with a separate infobase/book dealing with each aspect of my life. These infobases/books are recorded on DVD1, DVD2 and DVD10 and all contain the introductory heading: REFLECTIONS, except those infobases/books about my parents, my wife, my children, family reunions, my ancestors which are recorded on DVD5, DVD6 and DVD9 and which contain the introductory heading: OUR FAMILY TREASURY, financial and property archives which are recorded on DVD3 and DVD4 and contain the introductory heading: FINANCIAL and PROPERTY ARCHIVES and video archives that are recorded on DVD3V, DVD4V and DVD5V.