Sarah Hamby

At a large Horton reunion in Quanah, Texas in 1976, I wanted to know who was whom, so I started interviewing attendees and sketching family trees on a paper tablecloths. My mom and a cousin of hers joined in. When I left at the end of the day, I happily said "Boy, I learned a lot", and figured that that was the end of it.

But my mother and her cousin each wanted to keep the tablecloth. My mother won when she said "Robin works with computers; he'll do something with it." So I entered the names (no dates or places) in outline form into a text file on a mainframe computer, and discovered that I had 636 names! By the time of the next reunion a year later, I had formatted the list to leave room for dates and places and new people. I carried more and more copies (for distribution) of more and more people in more and more sophisticated printouts to frequent reunions over the next 25 years, eventually growing the Horton side of my database to 1146 people, and my entire database to over 11,000 people.

Boy, I've sure learned a lot.