It all began when we were deciding as a
group what topic we wanted for our site. Since there were
more boys than girls, it was no surprise that war stuff was
going to be the theme. The girls wanted something they would
like as much. They decided that they would be interested in
looking into the inventions that were created because of
wars. But what war?
We knew a
lot about the Civil War, because we had already studied it.
Still, WWII was pretty interesting too. We knew we were
going to study it later, but we didn't know much about it.
We decided to try to cover both of them. In a few weeks, we
realized that we had gotten in over our heads, so after a
lot of talking, we decided we had to drop one of them, but
which one?
We wanted to
talk to some real people, maybe on the Internet, or on the
phone. Since the Civil War was fought so long ago, we
couldn't talk to any one who was there. It looked like we
had our answer. You guessed it, we decided that WWII was our
best shot (best Shot, get it. war, shot.. oh well), but who
did we know that could tell us about their experiences?
Just about
that time there was a lot of talk about going back to war
with Sadam Hussein. It was kind of exciting until we heard
that troops stationed in Texas were going to be sent to
fight. We realized the our own relatives might be affected
by this war. Our own cousins and uncles could be leaving.
That's when it hit home... we knew the answer to our last
question. We knew people who were part of the WWII
experience... our own families. Our grandfathers and
grandmothers all did their part to help win the war. Some
were in the middle of it (check out Caitlin's and Kaycie's stories). Others
were sacrificing in other ways at home (you can find out
more about this in Ben's story). Our job was
to find out what parts they played.
As we
researched our topic, each of us found out things about our
families that changed the way we thought about WWII and made
us proud of where we came from. Old boxes of newspaper
clippings, diaries, and black and white pictures started to
pile up. Then Matthew's mom came in carrying an old
scrapbook that her great, great uncle had kept right
up to 1938 when he died. It had letters, newspaper
clippings, and pictures all carefully preserved for over 60
years. She told us that it was so special that the Holocaust
Museum in Houston wanted to add it to their collection when
the family felt they could part with it. (Look for more
about this scrapbook in Matthew's story).
We knew the
answer to the question that we hadn't even asked ourselves.
How were we going to preserve all of these great stories
that were being passed down to us? In a 21st century
electronic scrapbook of course! And the rest, as they say,
is history, OUR history.
But if it
was going to be a 21st century scrapbook, we needed
technology to bring the picture into focus. That's where
Kenneth came in. He surfed
the net for links that would make our stories come to life
by finding background stories to go along with our personal
chronicles.
If after you
have browsed through our stories, you become curious to find
out what the stories that make up your history are. We would
love for you to sign our
guestbook and share them with us.
