We had been designated the family historians and had spent many a delightful weekend going through pictures and slides with Georgie, recording stories and enjoying our time with her. When Georgie died, we spent many weekends with Walt’s brothers going through all the items in the house.

Image shows a picture of three young girls from the 1920's over a title that says "Memories: Growing up in Iowa in the 1920's by Georgina Theresa Link Hoel" edited by Walter and Michelle Hoel
The front cover of our booklet. The watermark was created from an actual page from Georgie’s notes.

There was an antique trunk at the foot of her bed, and we opened it with curiosity. Once when I had been visiting (we went at least once a month in the last few years of her life, sometimes just me, sometimes Walt and I), she had opened the trunk and shown me an envelope full of things from her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I knew there were scrapbooks in the trunk as well. We weren’t sure what else we might find.

There was a spiral bound notebook in the trunk, and it contained the stories we have shared in the recent posts about Georgie’s memories. We knew it was special and wanted to find a way to share it with all of the family. It took a while until we were emotionally ready to figure out the best way to share it.

Creating the booklet

In 2006, we decided to produce a booklet for the family and planned how we wanted it to look and what it should include. We thought it would be nice if we could show on maps all the places she talked about, and pictures of many of the people and things she discussed.

Image show pictures of some of Georgina's family and the farm where her grandparents lived and the building where her grandfather was born.
One of several pages of pictures.

I took some time to transcribe her notes and we added some explanatory information to help with terms and references that might not be familiar to everyone. We visited a good friend in Fort Madison who let us stay with her while we were doing our research. She proved to be an excellent resource as she owned the plat maps from 1916 that we copied!

Image shows a page of text talking about Georgie's family.
Some text from the booklet.

We visited many of the locations Georgie mentioned and took pictures of the buildings. Walt and I sorted through piles of photographs and selected the ones we wanted to use. We scanned the pictures and edited them to remove scratches and adjust brightness.

Since I had been working on the family history, I had family trees for many of people she mentioned. I included several sections of our family tree in the booklet as well.

Image show family trees for the Kruemplemann and Wellman family.
Kruemplemann and Wellman family trees.

Printing the booklet

We didn’t really have a way to do the printing at home, so we looked at our options and chose a local copy center. The information needed to be ready to print on a thumb drive, so we created the lay out of the pages and took them to the printer. The files were so large (for the day) that each page of pictures had to be a separate file. Once everything was printed, we used a hole punch and assembled the booklets in folders with a clear cover.

Each brother got their own copy, as did all of Georgie’s grandkids and her sister Fran. We also sent booklets to several of our cousins.

Putting it on the blog

When we decided to share them on the blog, we used natural breaks in the narrative to create the different posts. If you read them in order, you will get the whole story. You can find all of the posts using the tag Memoir. The first post in the series is here.

We hope you have enjoyed reading these stories on our blog.