Beck, Mom and I loaded up the Impala, and headed to Oak Ridge for Roaul’s funeral tomorrow. Today, though, we spent catching up with members on Mom’s side of the family.

We went to see my grandmother in Maryville. I can’t tell you exactly when I last saw her, but it’s been four or five years, I think. Beck had only met her once.

We went to her apartment (15th floor, overlooking the mountains — beautiful scenery), and caught up on all kinds of things. I even got to do a little computer work for her, and got her machine functioning at 100% again. She’s got a fast, fast connection, and that got us to talking about “The Project”. The Project is the capturing of my family’s history through photos that all of us have been hoarding away for years.

The basic concept is that I’ll scan images (negatives, slides, prints, etc.) from various folks’ archives, and post them on my server. I’ll send the link around to any family that I can, and let them identify the who, where, what and why for the photos. A little classification, a little HTML crafting (maybe another combination of MT and JAlbum), and it will be preserved with all the details we can all remember.

Grandma pulled out a big box of photos, and handed it to me as the cornerstone for capturing images of the Holley and Cox families. This is a gold mine of images of relatives I’ve probably never met, and would have no other way of getting. I can’t wait to start getting these images processed scanned, and on the web.

After visiting Grandma, we went to see Mom’s sister, Frances, in Oak Ridge. I think it’s been at least ten years since I’ve seen her, and it was wonderful to catch up with her after so long. She is a wonderful person, full of life… and a NASCAR fan, like me.

Returning to the hotel, we decided to grab a bite of dinner, after which we all went to bed after an exhausting day of travel and time well-spent with family. Over all of this, of course, was a sense of dread — tomorrow will be a long day.