Growing up my grandfather wrote his autobiography. It was typed and I always wanted to read it but he only had the one copy and knowing me, I probably would have spilled grape soda on it. It was probably the right decision to keep me away from it.
When he died, we were sent a PDF copy of it which I uploaded to Scribd for posterity and also knowing that it was there in case a hard drive crashed.
A couple of months ago, Jordon started to read it in a way that only he does and kept opening browser window after browser window. He was constantly Googleing things that my grandfather had written. When I asked him why, he replied, “Well he put in all of these details about his adventures, surely he thought we would be interested in them”. I was amazed as we started to flip between Wikipedia entries, webpages, and photos of what it was that my grandfather, grandmother, and family would have seen and experienced.”
My grandfather was clear when he said that he was writing this for future generations in the fact that it would be helpful to them so I set out in making his autobiography more accessible to the boys or anyone else that wanted to learn about the family history.
I had a PDF but if you have ever cut and paste anything from a PDF into anything, you know you lose the formatting. Jordon cut and pasted almost 200 pages into Apple Pages for me. I then used his Mac and cut each chapter into Mars Edit where I then had to copy it again and then paste it without formatting. It kept the line breaks for me and nothing else.
Then I had to hand tweak each line break and paragraph break so it was formatted properly. After doing all of that, I had essentially the same thing I started with and that took days of work.
Next I started going through it again and again looking for things to link to. I found photos of old Georgetown on Flickr. I found links on Wikipedia. I found restaurant websites from the 1990s with midi background music. I also learned a lot about my grandfather and parents which was interesting as well.
Jordon helped me a lot. Google and him just have a great working relationship and he knows how to find what he is looking for. It made it a lot easier for me. He was always helpful when he said, “that doesn’t sound or look right” when tracking down historical links. Sure enough he would find the correct information.
The entire autobiography is online at alfredgilkes.blogspot.com. It’s still a work in progress but I will be adding more links and information as I find it.
A couple of the chapters I found pretty interesting.
- My great grandmother and great grandfather
- His years living in a prison colony.
- His years in the jungle in Guyana.
- A 1959 vacation to the United States (thanks to Jordon for finding all sorts of photos from that era)
- Life in England
- Moving back to Guyana (and not liking it)
- His final years (after I was kind of estranged from the family)
There are 47 chapters to his autobiography in all. Some are more interesting than others (true of all of our lives) but putting this all together gave me an understanding of his life that I never had before.