Danville woman makes recording family history easy

Clara Fountain makes recording family history look easy.

During her presentation at the Wednesday Club last week, Fountain, a retired Averett University librarian and archivist, shared what she has learned about organizing and preserving information about ancestors.

“Let’s have fun,” she began, standing beside three tables spread with the pictorial biographies she has created about her family members as well as a bound set of 10 volumes of Danville’s history.

Recording Danville’s history is where her successful system began.

“I’m a collector,” she confessed. “I could even be called an obsessive collector. I save things and put them in or-der. It’s just what I do. For example, since fifth grade, I have saved newspaper articles on Danville history. Why? I don’t know.”

But she decided several years ago that boxes and file folders weren’t the best way to store everything.

Her answer was the small copy machine she had purchased to copy her parents’ bills and papers. She copied all the articles vertically on pages and then added dates.

“The stacks grew exponentially, so I took them all out and stacked them according to general categories,” she ex-plained. “Then I needed to index them, so in the mid-90s, I found a computer program to do that.”

She then sent her organized files off to be bound professionally. Gary Grant, a local historian, convinced her that the public library needed a collection also, so she generously had more copies made that are available to the public.

“This photocopying gave me impetus to do it for others, so I copied all my mother’s articles,” Fountain said.

Family history next

It was time to start organizing own family history, which involved the “massive amounts of family history” she inherited after her parents’ home was sold in 1994.

“I have books, scrapbooks, family Bibles, loose clippings, filing cabinets filled to the brim, photographs (framed and unframed), and letters going back to the mid-1800s,” she said. “I’m drowning in it, but I keep on going through my records, over and over, looking for ways to use what I already own.”

She, in fact, said she had told a friend that it was somewhat of a burden to have more family history than you know what to do with.

“Dad’s family history was lost in the Civil War with the burning of courthouses, so he began to collect in-formation on various Garretts all across America,” she said. “His family records continued to grow. He collected photographs and statistics for hundreds of relatives, quite distant from his direct lines …

“We even found a huge trunk in the attic that was filled to the top with handwritten letters. The newspapers covering them were dated 1942. All the letters were older than that.”

Fountain spent months reading the letters, eventually discarding 90 percent of them because they had “absolutely no value.”

“But there were many letters that I found simply fascinating, and I can’t let go of them,” she said. “I haven’t thought of a plan for those yet. But I will.”

She decided that she could make pictorial biographies — copying the pictures and articles she had and then adding information.

“In my family biographies, I included scans of all the certificates that I could find: birth, death, marriage, diplo-mas,” she said. “I used photographs of all ages of each person, even their tombstones. Descriptions included hair and eye color, height (not weight) and many stories about each one. My intent was to totally flesh out my people in order to hand down their personalities, not just their dates.”

With the organizing behind her, she sent her books off and had pictorial biographies of her parents and both set of grandparents professionally bound. Over the course of the next three Christmases, she gave a set of each to all of her grandparents’ grandchildren.

All the cousins who wanted one got CDs of the biographies. She also discovered how to create books online and made one for her niece for a bridal gift, along with a fancy printout of a family tree.

Another project

Then Fountain had to figure out a way to preserve all the vintage photos she had.

“How should I store them? What kind of system?” she said. “I had hundreds of them in different forms, and I needed a safe method. Old photos can last for generations if they are kept away from the sun, cigarette smoke and moisture.”

Concluding that the best way to store the photos was in acid-free storage boxes, she finally settled on a system.

“I took out each picture — I do everything one step at a time — and make a copy of each one and put it in an acid-free sleeve,” she explained. “I wrote the names on the back and gave each copy the same number as the original in the box.”

Fountain said she is on her seventh box of family pictures “with no end in sight.”

Helping a friend

As part of her Wednesday Club presentation, Fountain explained how she had begun a pictorial biography for one of her best friends, Niki Fallis, who didn’t know a lot about her family history.

In an impressive explanation of genealogical research, Fountain showed all the information about the past that could be gleaned from city directories, newspaper ads, telephone books, online maps and obituaries.

With only a tad bit of information Fallis had shared with her, Fountain was able to put together more than 30 pages of a pictorial biography as a surprise for her friend.

“It always amazes me how much can be created from so little,” Fountain said.

Through her research, Fountain was able to find out such information as a picture of the inside of the restaurant which Fallis’ father co-owned in 1953, when telephone numbers in the city changed from having “SWift” as a prefix to numbers, pictures of her parents’ birthplaces in Greece and a picture of the first Greek language class in Danville.

“You can find anything on the Internet,” Fountain said.

Encouraging words

Fountain did her best to assure people that preserving their family history is possible.

“You don’t have to start at the beginning,” she said. “Just jump in.”

Her son, Mark, compared assembling family history to working a jigsaw puzzle, according to Fountain. “You start by finding any two pieces that go together, like a picture and some information about it, and continue from there,” she said. “No one works puzzles from left to right, top to bottom. Do whatever suits you. The genealogy police won’t be looking over your shoulder.”

Even those who don’t own a computer can compile their family history, she said. Kinko’s and Walmart will scan for anyone, then the information can be added by hand.

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and get started,” she said. “Your children will love you for it.”

• Elzey is a freelance writer for the Danville Register & Bee.

Fountain’s helpful hints for assembling family history

• You just jump in, and keep on going.

• Work on one page at a time.

• Print on only one side of a page for your family books because inks from home printers will stick if you print on the backs.

• Don’t use page numbers so you can add pages later as you discover information. (Fountain uses three-ring binders and page protectors.)

• Add pictures wherever appropriate, moving them and the text around with your computer.

• When you have enough, print out the finished pages and send it to a bindery. Fountain uses the HF-Group in Greensboro (www.thehfgroup.com) for about $35 per bound copy.

• Choose the form that is easiest for you to do . . . a scrapbook, a notebook, or a bound book. Just do something!