One of the things on my New Year's todo list was to transcribe by sister LaVerne's book/novellas that contain a wealth of family history, and get her notes back to her. Some of it was typed, but she had a hard-drive crash a couple of years ago, and all she salvaged was the paper copy. I have completed scanning all of it, including the hand-written notes. I did the OCR thing on the typed pages.
I have read a some of it as I have been editing what the OCR gave me. It turns out to be a great story of survival of black people in the early days following slavery. Our mother told it to LaVerne over 50 years ago when she was fighting breast cancer. I have a picture in my mind of the two of them sitting under a tree in our back yard, Mother talking, LaVerne taking notes. I'm hoping that if I dig through my old photos, I can find something, some part of it that I can craft into that picture in my head.
I'm going to let this story lead me to where it wants to go. My sister will be 82 on her birthday next month. (I was born the year she graduated from college.) She and her husband are in relatively good health for a couple their age. LaVerne has the usual assortment of cardio-vascular ailments that plague all my siblings. Just before Christmas she was misdiagnosed and given the wrong medication that sent her into a downward spiral for a couple of weeks. It made her start talking about dying, but once she, on her own, decided to stop taking that medication she was back to herself in a couple of days.
Still, I'm going to try to get her to fill in as much of the story as I can. Maybe I can get it onto Lulu.com before her birthday, and give it to her as a gift.
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