I am so delighted to share some stories that Marion Schmidt wrote about her life experiences.  The stories were written in cursive by Marion herself at her kitchen table in Griffith, Indiana.  She even wrote a list of her 54 stores for easy reference on the first two pages of the document with her stories.  Please send me any additional Schmidt stories (and especially Marion's poems) that aren't included here.  I would very much like to share them on this site!

Two binders filled with family documents sat in my living room for almost 8 or 9 months with good intentions to scan and share with other family members.  My mother-in-law spent countless hours researching the Schmidt family history and organizing the information and documents into these binders to share with other family members.   At a meeting at her house, the task of scanning became mine to accomplish (with very little arm twisting), and the group talked about how nice it would be to have a collection point for this and other family information and documents.  The long Memorial Day weekend became the time that enough was enough, and I nicely asked my daughter to come with me to Staples to "scan until we dropped."  The task was accomplished on Saturday after almost three hours in the store.

The idea of creating a central repository has been bouncing around in my mind since our meeting at my dad's and mother-in-law's house to review family history.  Here is the story of how I came by the solution of hosting the information on the internet on a webpage.

1.  My email provider took my one step too far with the monthly cost of their service.  The cost of the email service stayed at $9.99/month for the first 10 years that we lived in Illinois.  Then, the costs started increasing over the past five years, culminating in a one year +40% increase to almost $19/month.   The dreaded Herculean project of moving from one email address to another, but the task was upon me, and there was no turning back.  

2. A critical consideration was to NEVER go through the painful work of changing my email address again in my lifetime.  The solution had to be permanent and couldn't depend on the existence and good behavior of another company (even very big Goliath companies like Google or Microsoft).   The selected option was to purchase a domain name that I could take with me anywhere I might want or need to go.

3. A further consideration was to have the ability to download my emails down from the internet and store them on my own computer for two reasons.  Keeping thousands of unnecessary emails with no ongoing value is one of my big failings with my "pack rat" tendencies.  Avoiding cloud storage fees to keep these worthless emails in the cloud didn't sit well with my "getting your moneys worth" tendencies.  The domain name solution would most likely require me to use IMAP (rather than POP3) which keeps emails in the cloud and locally.  With the IMAP protocol, the email that are not saved locally are lost if deleted from the cloud.  My current email software cannot save emails locally.  Therefore, the domain solution had a serious drawback to being my permanent solution. 

4. The next important consideration was that the solution needed to be cheaper and/or provide more value than Earthlink's email services.  One of the few current options to overcome my previously described IMAP problem is to use Microsoft Outlook.  Microsoft has long cut me off from being able to use the Outlook software that came with my permanent license for Office 2010.  The switch from my permanent Microsoft Office licenses to Microsoft 365 was discussed with my brother Larry and my dad (especially during the past year). The prospect of losing the "one and done" permanent license went against my "penny pinching" tendencies 

Subscribing to Microsoft 365 Business Standard seemed like the right solution since it solved my download and cost considerations.  The subscription cost $12.50/month with the annual solution was lower than the new Earthlink cost/month, and the software package would give me a great deal more value than staying with Earthlink.  Also, the subscription included Microsoft SharePoint which could be the central repository for all the Schmidt documents. 

I "pulled the trigger" on the Microsoft 365 Business Standard one year subscription, and I started working through setting-up SharePoint to house the documents after getting home from Staples.  However, everyone accessing the repository needed a SharePoint license to access the data on SharePoint.  It seemed highly improbable that other family members would have these licenses since SharePoint is a business software solution.  Therefore, I had another obstacle to overcome to achieve my goal of making the Schmidt documents available in a shared space. 

I was researching web page solutions as an alternative option to SharePoint last week without yet knowing about the licensing problem.   Google Sites was the option that really stood out to me as a very viable web page solution.  The web page option was already superior to the SharePoint option even before stumbling on the SharePoint licensing problem.  Being able to use the myschmidt.net domain sealed the deal for me.  I worked through the weekend setting up this webpage, solved a couple of German handwriting mysteries along the way, and even purchased a registered Schmidt logo for personal, business and web page use.

This is the "origin story" for this web page.  My hope is that the site will serve our needs well and will be used for many years to come.  Enjoy!

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