2011 January 21 « Reader458′s Weblog

Why Don’t You Pursue Your Family History?

I’d like to ask anyone reading this post to answer the following poll. Call it Genealogy, Family History, or… If you don’t work on your Family History, why not?

January 21, 2011 Posted by Steve | Family, Family History, Genealogy | Leave a Comment

About Stephen M. Watts (aka. Reader458)

My wife Julie and I are the proud parents of 3 adult children. So far, we also have 3 grandchildren and 1 more on the way! We are extremely proud of each - they are all unique and care deeply about our world. We recently became “empty nesters” and our children are scattered pretty much across the country much like the rest of our family. The good news is all have been very much involved in online activities so we have lots of ways to keep in touch. Our children’s trials and tribulations online and offline would constitute multiple volumes if written – as I am sure is true with many (most?) children.

I was employed with Texas Instruments (TI) as an engineering and operations professional for nearly 31 years and took advantage of an early retirement incentive offer in February of 2009 to “retire from TI” to pursue other interests – and for better or worse my interests are diverse.

We established a family business in mid-2007 as a platform for business experimentation. We’ve pursued quite a variety of areas all centered primarily around consumer-facing web automation:

Online educational approaches for primary school participants (prior to mid-2007)
Online family history (also primarily prior to mid-2007)
Technology to enhance the quality of life for the elderly/handicapped
Helping individuals manage/share/enhance their online identities (quiltid.com)
Providing home seekers with a neutral online place to conduct their home search (homingbird.com)
Providing recreational softball team managers with tools to organize, manage and track their team (softballapp.com)

We are all very interested in (and Julie appears to be addicted to) family history activities. We recently sold our large home with the intent of downsizing and having more flexibility to travel at least temporarily while our children and their families figure out where they are going to settle. The process of packing and moving was a real eye-opener. One of the business opportunities making itself evident during the process was the issue of what to do with large physical photo caches. While the answer seems obvious (scan them and upload them to one of the services like Flickr), if you have ever set out to scan thousands of photos you know that it quickly becomes heavily burdensome. In reality, there are things you care about with respect to your photo collection (aside from getting the photos into a more secure (digital) state) that simply are not addressed by existing services. We’re designing and implementing a service to address the issues we’re seeing as we put our photo caches online. This is a very good application for consumer-facing web automation, social networking and family history approaches and technologies – our specialty areas. In the process, we expect to provide a place for Julie to bring her well developed digital photo restoration skills to bear while we also develop our ability to perform many restoration functions automatically online. This likely won’t be our last foray into family history and empty nester downsizing activities.

I attended Iowa State University for the first 2 years of my Electrical Engineering degree pursuit. I subsequently received my Bachelor of Science in Electrical (Computer) Engineering in 1982 from the University of Houston while employed with TI as a part of their Engineering Development Program. TI also afforded me the opportunity to complete my Executive MBA with Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 1996.

I exercise fairly consistently to maintain my health. I have read widely and continue to do so. I have a passion for computers and technology and believe we are only just scratching the surface on what can be accomplished in the area. As I have claimed previously in this BLOG, I enjoy writing, and have nurtured a long-standing desire to be an author which I may well satisfy at some point – we’ll see.

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Why Don’t You Pursue Your Family History?

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