Lovely Guara Bloom

About the Hargrove Family Website


This site contains a history of our branch of the Hargrove family told mainly in the form of annual Christmas letters, published for 40 years now, as well as some powerpoint slide shows, and lately, some PDF files and even some audio.

Our tradition of writing annual reports began when the family moved from Houston to Irvine, CA. Wanting to alert friends to our new address, etc., we sent out a brief letter with our Christmas cards. That was 1977. Buoyed by at least two nice comments, we decided to keep at it. The letters have become more elaborate as the years have passed, but have always tried to be upbeat and a bit funny.

We added photos when the technology became available, first in stodgy black-and-white, now in glorious color. We moved everything to the web when FrontPage made it easy to create the pages. Today, these pages seem to be hopelessly retro. We're trying to move with the times.

In case you wonder who actually writes everything, the answer is "Jim writes most of it, but Linda always edits it before it goes out."

Linda has taken most of the best pictures, but most of the spider photos are Jim's work. (You'll notice that most photos have Jim's copyright notice when one appears. Linda started screaming about this suggesting I be more careful, so now, she gets proper credit at least some of the time.)

Virtually all the photos have been fixed up using various tools.

Google Photos does a great job of organizing photos. They are the first to make it easy to use the same photo in more than one presentation. Moreover, when you edit the text for each photo, it shows up in all the albums automatically. I've used the text to describe some of the more important photos. Comments are always welcome.

Comments and corrections are always welcome.

If you happen to have an old copy of one of the missing reports, we would be interested in getting it back, just to complete the record. We think we missed a year, probably 1978, but that was a long time ago, and we're not sure.