User:Jayharris

My name is Jim Williams and had my 80th birthday last week. My age I state with a certain shock and surprise. Neither of my parents passed their 65th birthday.

Education: B.S. degree in Human Relations from University of San Francisco.

Military: Drafted into the Army (1951-53), with most of it in Korea, I was in the Medical Corps and held job classifications as Physical Therapy Tech and finally Operation Room Tech. Honorably discharged.

Career: 95% of my work experience was in some form of health care administration, including being the County Public Health Administrator in a California county.

Genealogy: Interest in our family history for my immediate family began in the mid 1970's in California when our high school sophomore daughter came home with an assignment to write as much of her family history as she could discover. We had a Mormon neighbor who suggested a visit to the nearby LDS Family History Center. My wife accepted the job of transporting and helping her, as also getting letters out to older family members. The assignment was completed and turned in at the end of the school year but my wife never "completed" her quest. She worked relentlessly cranking the microfilm readers by hand. It was all grunt work with personal computers only a gleam in Bill Gate's eye. She worked on her family lines and even harder on my family. It was only in 2003 when, after retirement, she handed me the three-ring binders containing what she had discovered about my family. I have worked on it some most every day since then. We have visited several libraries but now work mostly from online available data, trying to sort proof and "reasonable probability" from mere speculation. I spend a lot of time with the Census Collection on Ancestry.com. We are in our seventh year of subscription. I also subscribe to Footnote.com and have online access to Heritage Quest through a regional library.

Thanks to my cousin, Pam Pollard, who asked me to join her in putting our lines-in-common in WeRelate.org. I am happy to be working through the tutorials and learning the conventions that make it worth the extra effort.

Thanks to the volunteers who really respond to our issues!

jayharris