Wow, I guess today is a twofer.

Those of you who know me know that I like local (Utah) history. I especially like old buildings and photos of old buildings when they were new. A few days ago I hit up the HABS/HAER collection that the Library of Congress maintains and saw that their website had got a serious revamping and it is now much faster.

Anyway, this got me to dig through Utah’s photo archives that are on-line and I found some really really really good ones? How good?

Let’s say I had a ‘sixth sense’ moment of shock and surprise when I did a search for my own family name, at this site and found something very amazing.

I came to a visitor’s register that had our family name on it, and it was basically a notebook with names scrawled on it, apparently from 1961. I didn’t know what to make of it. What was this log for? What member of my family was on it that made it relevant? I scanned the pages, slowly, slowly, trying to make out the names (I did this for a living for about 8 months in 1998-1999, so I know a few things about reading the writing of people who don’t think anybody will ever read the writing.)

So, scanning the page, I had one of those spine-tingling moments, you know? Like deja vu. Well, what hit my brain first is that I had recognized the handwriting on one particular line. Second, is that I recognized the names of my uncle, father, and grandfather, written, very legibly, almost 50 years ago, scanned a few years ago and catalogued. My dad would have been 12 or so.

Wow 🙂

edit: Even odder, is that it appears to have been Dax’s birthday, only … he wasn’t born yet!