One thing I forgot to do when I started my family tree many moons ago was document what my immediate family was doing and when. I don’t know why I didn’t think it was important. How many times to I get frustrated that someone just up and moved to a whole new state? Well, I should be ashamed of myself for feeling that way! My brother moved to Miami, Florida shortly after he graduated high school and I never made note of it. Don’t worry I’ve corrected that mistake!
My new mission is seeking out the dates of where and what my family was doing. We moved around quite a bit compared to previous generations. I want to at least make notes of it. I used to have all my Mom’s family homes marked in Google Earth but I didn’t know at the time how to back those up and lost them in a computer crash. I hope she doesn’t mind going over it again.
One of the valuable pieces of documentation given to me was my Dad’s Marine Corps DD-214. It’s basically a discharge paper you get when you are exiting the military. That’s his boot camp graduation photo up top, and I made sure to log that into my family file too. In my scanned image I didn’t crop out the graduation date and officers that are listed along the bottom of the photo, I’m sure I’ll want those later in case of file corruption.
Now all I have to do is figure out which one is my 17 year old father.