When I was a kid, I joined Brownies. No, not a cooking class. This was the precursor to Girl Scouts. All the other girls in my class were joining, so I did too. I don’t remember much about Brownies – I guess it didn’t make much of an impression. That’s probably why when I got old enough to move up from Brownies to Girl Scouts my attention was turned to a different club, 4-H. The impression at the time was that 4-H was for farm kids. I wasn’t a farm kid. I didn’t have any cows, but I had some other friends in 4-H. They said I didn’t have to live on a farm to join! My mom, a farm kid herself, also approved because she had been in 4-H. So, I didn’t move on to Girl Scouts. I joined 4-H instead.
Joining 4-H
In 4-H, you could learn how to do lots of different things. This was right up my alley because I got bored fast (still do), and was always looking for the next new thing. I took classes called “projects” and I learned how to stencil paint, paint pictures (not very well), cook (or how not to cook, as my mom put it, since she was my project leader), and knit. I made lots of things, took them to the fair, and got ribbons and prizes. I even got a grand champion once on some Norwegian cookies, but that’s another story.
I managed to slide some of my commentary past my mom.
My Final 4-H Project
When I was 14, the final year I was involved in 4-H, I looked in the project options and saw that you could sign up for genealogy. Cool! I already knew how to do that. I could write up the family tree and take it to the fair!
The problem was, my family tree was already huge! By that time, my parents had been involved in genealogy for about 7 years and they had piles of information. Where should I start? Should I just do a pedigree chart? How do I get that to fit on the size poster accepted at the fair? I would have had to write really small. What kind of project could I do that was actually my work and not just copies of what my parents already had? Hmmm…Maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
Since I was the only one who signed up for genealogy in my 4-H club, my mom became the project leader and she helped me narrow down what to do. I did make a pedigree chart and I did write small.
My First Go at Writing Family History
I also wrote a family history book. For that, I ended up focusing on the Dilley side of the family. I wrote it in the format of a family history book, complete with chapters filled with names, dates, and places, stories that we knew, and pictures. With my mom’s permission, I even included several years’ worth of her Christmas letters to family, since they held a great chronology of what was going on from year to year.
I seem to remember writing out my family history by hand. Nope, no Chromebooks to type on back then! Talk about writer’s cramp. Since I didn’t learn how to type until high school, my mom typed it up for me after I had written it. She also did a lot of editing, of course. For some reason, she didn’t think my smart comments were appropriate. My dad helped with the pictures, format, and final review.
The Blue Ribbon
To finish my project, I put the typed pages, magnetic photo pages with black and white photos, the copies of the Christmas letters, and a few other odds and ends all in a soft-covered binder. I used my fancy label maker to title it The Dilley Family. I was so excited it was finished and entered my family history book and pedigree chart in the Waukesha County Fair in the summer of 1978. After the judging was done, I was very happy to see that I got blue ribbons on both. My work paid off!
I Come From a Long Line of Dilleys
I abandoned 4-H for the school band and tennis team the following year. My 4-H project sat on the shelf and collected dust. Sometime in the 1990s, however, my parents informed me that they were self-publishing a book on the Dilley family. By that time they had a lot more information than what I included in my project, but they asked if they could use excerpts from it and would give me author credit on their book. I said sure, why not? They helped me write it anyway.
So in 1994, my parents published their first version of the Dilley family history, entitled I Come From a Long Line of Dilleys. In this book, you’ll find references to 13-year-old me and my 4-H project. (I was actually 14 by the time my project was finished.) An updated version was published in 1998 and the book was copyrighted in 2001. Since my parents self-published it, I keep finding copies of this book in their basement. You can even find the reference information in WorldCat!
I have toyed with the idea of updating the Dilley book. It and my 4-H project are both very out of date. That’s a huge job, and I will probably wait until I retire to tackle it. But I’m glad I learned how to write a family history at such a young age. Thanks to Mom, Dad, and my 4-H club!
Photo Credit:
From the records of Janet Meydam.
