Kathy and I visited my parents (Henry and Eunice Tuell) in Oklahoma in August. I purchased a high definition video camera to do some genealogy interviews with Mom and Dad, as well as to shoot B-roll video of prairie and family cemeteries for my ongoing project -- a personal documentary of my ancestors who settled in the Chickasaw Nation in Indian Territory.

My parent's home serves as the family depository for old photos and family artifacts, and I've spent more than one vacation with a scanner and boxes of old photos. However, this trip I was surprised to find a previously undiscovered cache of old photos, ranging from tin-types of my great grandfather to school photos of my parents. There also were boxes of crumbling newspapers and clippings that were evolving into dust. I found more than 500 photos in all, so I quickly borrowed a scanner from my sister and went to work.

We also purchased a half dozen or so photo boxes of various sizes, reams of acid-free paper, a portfolio for the newspapers and Kathy set about archiving everything to slow deterioration as I scanned.

It will take months to finish embedding caption information in the photo files (I spent hours getting Dad to identify people), but I'm trying to post them in our gallery as I find time. I've already posted lots of photos from the Frost-White branch.

I'm working on about 200 photos of Mazie Frost and Henry Offord Tuell (my paternal grandparents). They purchased cameras when they were courting and obviously had great fun documenting their courtship and brief marriage -- he died in the 1918 flu epidemic after they'd been married only two years.

I'll try to get those posted soon, but I'm also renovating two bathrooms ... I'm sure you know how that goes.

Tom Tuell