Keep the Dash Alive

Before the writing, before the organizing — preservation. In this first method episode, Julie shares how she digitized over 500 wartime letters between her grandparents Woodrow and Vera Bonner, written across the Pacific in 1945 and 1946. The free tool she used, why fragile letters and a child's handwriting got photographed before anything else, and the systematic transcription quirks that ended up revealing something about her grandparents she would not have learned any other way. If you have a box of family letters in a closet, this is the episode that tells you where to start. Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 is available on Kindle and audiobook. Paperback and hardcover coming soon.LINK TO BOOK ON AMAZON

In February 1946, my paternal grandfather, Woodrow Bonner, found a string of cultured pearls in a shop in Kobe and wrote to my grandmother, Vera, that he was going to try to buy them. He couldn't. What followed was an eight-week hunt across occupied Japan, three loose pearls in a wooden crate, and a string of letters that never quite explained. This is the story the book is named after. // Loose Pearls: A Marriage in Letters, 1945–1946 Next episode: how I sorted 548 letters, and you can also do this if you have written documents of your family.Amazon Book Link: Loose Pearls: https://www.amazon.com/Loose-Pearls-Marriages-1945-1946-Correspondence-ebook/dp/B0GZGG32V5/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GU5JQJS9UV0I&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hAzeTcXxjnnEilURvb3WqA.tnCbCN1An3CxqxdYjQwphW9E8wdU-aolIKWKvSfqDqc&dib_tag=se&keywords=loose+pearls+julie+bonner&qid=1778350576&sprefix=loose+pearls+julie+bonner%2Caps%2C430&sr=8-1

If you google the phrase "family history questions" you can find many pages that can give you ideas about what to share with future generations of your family. I was struck by one question that asked - do you have a toy you have kept from your childhood?When you are preserving the stories of your family, you can use Zoom and other platforms to create videos AND podcast episodes. Future generations will find these priceless!In this episode, this method is discussed around a story that I preserve for my family. The story is about the influence of my mother on my reading habits and a book I saved!

In 1971, my paternal grandmother, Vera Dors (Harper) Bonner, wrote a song with her niece, Norma (Bonner) Elmore. Norma wrote the music, and Vera wrote the lyrics. Later, the song was recorded as a birthday present to me.You will hear about the technology I used to pull the audio together and the history passed to me. I used Zoom to record the audio introductionThe music was on a cassette I pulled off using a USB cassette to digital recorderI used MixPad to combine the files to preserve it for family history!If you want to see the video: https://youtu.be/G4WlB2YnhxQ - in the video you can see a picture of Vera and a picture of the original score

Welcome to Keep the Dash Alive. I’m your host, Julie Bonner, and today we explore recording family voices. These are some of the coolest family history assets you will ever produce! If you have any questions about this episode, you can email me at [email protected]. Please find Keep the Dash Alive on Youtube for videos.

This the Keep the Dash Alive Podcast. This episode explores how DNA analysis helped me connect to a previously unknown half sibling in my extended family!

GPS applications on your smartphone can be a great boost to your family history research. Along with this podcast episode, I also have a video about GPS technology and family research on the Keep The Dash Alive YouTube channel. Also, on Amazon, you can find a Kindle book called "Beyond the Dash" that describes many of the technologies that can be useful to you as a family researcher. Enjoy!

Technology has brought us great online resources, but, you never know what you might find with your boots on the ground. Follow in your family footsteps to sometimes discover a nugget that would have never have been found in an online database. We also have a Keep the Dash Alive YouTube channel. If video fits your learning style, subscribe to that channel as well as this podcast!