A Little Bit of History

History is in the little things, the daily activities, the things people don't pay any attention to. As it is often taught, it's about military history, but I have little to no interest in that. I much prefer finding out about what people did for fun, what they ate, how they dressed, what they thought.

I was given a gift today.
A glimpse into my own history.

I started a website back when the internet was brand spanking new. I built it from scratch, from the ground up, coding everything by hand. I had to scan photos because digital cameras weren't around yet. I made pages about my family, about our interests, what we found fun. The kids made pages for themselves at very young ages. I wrote about our lives, about unschooling. About math.

Then our family circumstances changed, and I started a redesign of the site. I created a new front page, and uploaded it. It had links to newer things. Only a few things. No other information. And it no longer was connected to the navigational tools of the original site. Everything from the original site was still there, but not linked to the index page.

Time passed.
I got involved in creating other websites, and in blogging. My writing was going to those places, and others, rather than to my "personal website." That original site has remained unchanged, except for the front page, since 1998.
I forgot the password to change anything.

And then I had a major hard drive crash. I was able to recover many things- but not the files from that website.

This meant that I could spend some time trying to figure out the URLs of the old pages, and hunting around for them... or not.

This morning, on facebook, Sandra Dodd posted a link to one of her pages, one that has links to the writing of other unschoolers. I was curious about who she linked to, so I went to look. There was a link to one of MY pages, from long ago.

And THAT page has all the internal navigation intact, giving me access to everything else.

I have been having a very interesting morning.
I've been re-reading the things I wrote back then, some as old as about 1994. When my kids were 7, 4 and 1.

The best part is that the things I wrote then are still true today.
In some, I made some comments about what I might do in the future- and I was right.

I'll be recovering all of that now, thanks to Sandra.
I'll bring much of it to this blog, to discuss again.

If I were a new unschooler, and came across things written in the mid-nineties, I'd be curious to know what happened with those kids. How DID they grow up? How DID things turn out?

Look for some of these posts over the next few days.