Family History

Well, thanks to Peter at Holties House, I downloaded a great program for tracking my family history.

Now, there's a long story to this, so bear with me.

About 10 years ago, I started looking for ancestors of the Champagne family. I got as much information I could from my dad and mom about our family, including my great grandparents names and approximate birth/death dates.

I got on dozens of web sites, posting questions and asking about our family with no luck. I had purchased "Ultimate Family Tree" (UFT for short), and installed it and manually started adding what I knew.

Then, out of the blue, a gentleman from Texas emails me that he may have a .GED file that has some of my ancestors in it. His last name was Champagne also, and he sent me the file, only asking that after I added my family to it, that I export and send it back to him.

I imported it into the software, and.... I was stunned to see my grandfather there, and his father. I told the software to work it's way backwards, and I was in complete awe at the list of people, and how far back it went. The furthest back was Jean Beaugrand Champagne, born at about 1641. Almost all of the ancestors were from Canada (in the area of Quebec), and were farmers. I wish I could say I could go further back, but so far I've run into a dead end. I have to believe, that Jean Beaugrand Champagne's parents may have been from France, making it much more difficult to find them.

Oh, I forgot to mention.. the old software, UFT ran fine on my OLD PC that ran Windows 95 with a whopping 90 MHz processor. When I tried to install the software on anything above Windows 95, or any faster than the 90 Mhz, the program would refuse to run. I had tried to upgrade, but the company went under. A few people suggested a program that would slow down the CPU, but all I did was keep the OLD PC, and only use it for this one program. Imagine the other night, when I fired it up and it still works, just to get the file I needed off of it, to laugh as Windows 95 came up, and looked so antiquated.

Well, it worked fine thanks to Peter, and I can now keep looking, and updating.

On to the news:

Dog digs in backyard and uncovers leaking natural gas pipe. Homeowner isn't sure it's natural gas, so he uses his lighter to light it. Swing and a miss by Darwin

How come there were no teachers like this when I was in school?
Teacher who gave assignment to eighth-grade boys to research porn on the internet has been allowed to return to his job. Defended position by stating that he didn't mean for them to download porn

Mark.. this one's for you bud!
The 10 Star Wars Toys That Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities

And my favorite:
"It might have been sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads but I’m guessing it’s not," says expert referring to severed undersea cables (with artist rendering of said shark with frickin' laser beams)

That's it for this week.. have a great weekend!