Loose Leaves was an invention of my father Theron “Curly” Marsh, who, once he retired, starting writing the Marsh family newsletter. It wasn’t just a newsletter it was a well researched set of documents that contained our genealogy, chronicled the family exploits and presented much folklore that went well beyond just our immediate family. Indeed there was news, information and background on the extended families that Dad accumulated through marriage. When all was said and done there might have been hundreds of people in various families that were connected to Loose Leaves in one way or another.
This was back in 1977 or so and he carried on with it for about 25 years of annual issues of fifty or more pages each, personally typed on an old typewriter with many pictures, cut and pasted, poems and writings of ancestors and other memorabilia. Dad died in 2007 and I had hoped to continue the the plan of issuing a new Loose Leaves every year as he did. Unfortunately life gets in the way and I published only one such issue – just after his passing – which dealt most with his life and youth and contained many pictures which have been handed down through they years.
While I could never hope to match the loving care he gave Loose Leaves over that many years, I have always wanted to continue the effort in one form or another. Enter the internet, computers, Facebook and websites. Dad had none of these modern tools with which to generate the volume pages that he did. His was an entirely manual effort and, when visiting him, I often found him in his home office with pages spread around, scraps of cut up paper, Elmer’s glue everywhere, extra photos and copies that would be thrown out. And off to one corner of the room there was a freshly purchases laptop computer, hooked up to Compuserve, which he never learned how to use. It was hunt and peck from A to Z.
So now that I have allowed a few years to pass, I have decided that the technology is sufficiently advanced to enable me to efficiently create voluminous Loose Leaves style content and share it with the world that has been patiently waiting. I do have much to share as there are so many archives to publish and anecdotes to retell. My only problem has been deciding where to draw the line. Dad never drew the line. If he married someone, he would write about the whole new family. If someone in the whole new family got married, he would write about them. Thus I would think the geometric progression of all this would propagate to infinity and everyone would already know about Loose Leaves. Well, I guess we will find out!!
Dad
