Who is Joanne Todd?
What is a Kindred Keepsake?

Kindred = a group of persons of common ancestry
Keepsake = something kept or given to be kept as a memento
Memento = something that serves as a reminder

Therefore, a Kindred Keepsake is something that is
kept or given as a reminder of our common ancestory.

A little bit about myself for those who might be wondering who has gone to such great lengths to document their family history on the "new frontier" of the Internet. I was born in Charles City, Iowa in 1950 and moved to San Luis Obispo, California as a child with my mother, aunt, four cousins and sister (all in one car and one U-haul!). We all moved into my Grandparents 2-bedroom home until our new house was completed. It seemed like a lot of fun at the time!

In school, I was always involved with the publication of our newspaper or yearbook. During my Junior High School days, my friends and I had a friendly competition going as to who could create the most elaborate scrapbook. After taking some time out to nearly raise my two children, I went to work in 1976 at a local newspaper in California. I worked my way up in the composition room from setting type on an old lino-type machine to designing display advertising and the paste-up of the daily paper. Back then it involved a lot of tedious cutting and pasting. We were very limited in our use of type styles because each set of type was so expensive and complicated to use.

During that time in my life, I also attended night school and got a certificate in Graphic Design from UC Davis. In 1981, I moved to Eugene with my two children and got a job working for a large printing company where I have been ever since, working as the Manager of the Typesetting Department, Pre-Press Network Manager, Graphic Designer/Typographer and currently as the Webmistress of the Internet Services Division.

Here is a list of web sites that I have developed:

I spend ALL my free time enjoying this consuming hobby of genealogy! I am currently using Reunion 4.0 software on my Pentium computer at home and have been enjoying Windows 95. Since most of my time at work is spent in front of a Macintosh, I speak bilingual computereze! I also have Reunion on my Mac at work, but all my time there is spent with the standard publishing software: Quark XPress, Photoshop, Illustrator and Freehand.