My Dad's Blog, A Three Year Father-Son Project

 
My father and I have been working on a joint project for the past three years. We started in November 2007 when my daughter shared that she was creating The Mauney Family Blog before her son Isaac was born. My brother Mike came over to his house one day and created this blog for him since he thought that everyone needed to have a blog. Dad said to him, "What in the world is a blog?" He shared it was quite easy for anyone to have with no cost. He told him that at this point in his 80 year old life, a blog was one thing that he did not need; Mike insisted that they create one then and there so it would be on his computer just in case my dad would ever wanted to write anything to share with the folks that had access to it on the Internet.


My dad thought long and hard about what he could do with a blog since he came from a time that you did not waste anything and I imagine that went for digital resources too.  He kept asking himself and other, "What can I ever do with a blog?"  

For years I had asked Dad to tell us more about when he was young growing up in the country so the rest of the family and I would know a little about his life when he was young. He knew that for the past several years, I had tried to get him to share stories about our family history so he jumped on this opportunity. That day he started to write about some of the things that he enjoyed doing.  That is how the story of his life unfolded. We committed to work on this project together as a father - son project and set a goal to post a new entry about his life each week and for it to be published every Sunday and that we would continue until he finished telling his story.   Each week, he sent me an e-mail  that contained the journal entry for the week, I would edit, and we would publish on the blog with pictures.

A couple times we thought we were finished, had a break, but continued to add more content.  He even posted stories of his parents and each of his siblings each week for three months.  I finally know which cousins belong to my aunts and uncles!

As this project developed, I enouraged him to make recordings of some of the stories to be linked within the blog.  Here is a link to some of the blog entries where there is audio of him telling the stories.  At this time he has over 70 stories!   For Christmas this year I had a copy of his blog printed.   A digital copy is below and a .pdf copy can be downloaded.