This site contains a history of our branch of the Hargrove family told mainly in the form of annual Christmas letters, published for more than 35 years, as well as some powerpoint slide shows.
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, but 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, so now, she gets proper credit at least some of the time.) Virtually all the photos have been fixed up using Adobe Photoshop Elements, which used to be good, but now is slow and buggy.