January 13, 2005
There is a lot of interesting family history that deserves to be collected in one place. I'm volunteering to be the publisher.
The idea grew out of correspondence with Larry McCracken (father: Oren) and myself (father: Ray) in January 2006. That mail, unedited, isn't right for inclusion here, but there must be a lot of stuff that is. Uncle Floyd published a book of the columns he wrote after stepping down as the editor (?) of the San Diego Union (?), a number of which were about the family. I recall an oral history that Florence McCracken Frye did with her father Allen. There are lots of pictures.
I'll kick this off with some pictures, and invite contributions. This isn't exactly a chat room, if you know that term, meaning you can't post anything here without going through me. That's because I don't actually know how to set up a chat room, as much as anything else, but there may be benefits in having me apply a consistent format and other such details. I do not plan to edit submissions, however.
January 15, 2006
My current thinking is that there will be a subsite home page (you're here), modified of course, plus lots of links to other pages. The obvious thing would be to have a page for each person in the family who wishes to contribute and pages for any deceased members about whom there is information. All of the children of John and Clara Belle have passed on; any of us could write about our parents. Or our siblings and children. Lots of pictures. They mostly won't be as large as those below, and I can easily put several alongside each other.
We'll need an index or table of contents as this thing grows.
The size? It could get big, if enough people want to contribute and enough people find it interesting and useful. There is no limitation on file size, within some reasonable limits. I use this website in my teaching, obviously. I pay the modest cost of having it hosted. The storage provided by my hosting contract is huge, compared with anything I can imagine needing. That's not an issue. File size for downloading will have to be watched. I have broadband and tend to forget that not everybody does. This is mostly a matter of working with the compression of the photos to take the least space that gives good quality. I teach website design; I can handle that. I can accept text in most any form. Converting from any Microsoft product is really simple. Straight text files are OK, too. I can scan printed text.
The time to put contributions into place could be an issue, maybe. I do this willingly, as a labor of love, but my teaching will have to take priority at times. Let's not worry about that until we see how the project grows.
We will want genealogical information. Anything like a complete family tree would rapidly get out of hands, but somebody in the family must know more about that than I do. Click here to see a start.
Dan McCracken
The McCracken home in Clarkston, Idaho, about 1912.
Left to right: children Floyd, Jesse, Ray, Esther, Allen, Oren.
On right: Clara Belle Westhoffer McCracken (1868-1922), John Nelson McCracken (1863-1941)
Closer up.
Photo from late 1900 or early 1901. Left to right: Allen (1897-1984); John Nelson McCracken (1863-1941); Ray (1889-1978); Oren (1894-1980); Clara Belle Westhoffer McCracken (1868-1922); Esther (1900-1994). Not shown: Corrie (name uncertain, born about 1888, died as an infant); Jesse (1903-9132).
John Nelson McCracken, age 16.
John Nelson McCracken, undated photo.
Much more to come.
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