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Hello World! I am back on the web:). I am Deanna but you might remember me as Dede, DJ or D. I took on the pen name Lady Jayne after Kenny’s Grandma Wayne named me Lady Jane at our family wedding shower. My middle name is Jane and the Wayne’s are from England after all. A few years later I added the ‘y’. Just a note to all the future parents out there, a middle and last name really should not rhyme. And I laugh because my first two children, daughters Courtney and Sydney, also share my middle name so their given maiden names do have a rhyming middle and last name. What was I thinking lol?
Here it is January 1, 2016 and I am once again rebuilding my web presence. For some time now I have been wanting to put together a website dedicated to my son Ashton which fully chronicles his life living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. And today is the day I got started by registering the domain Action4Ashton.org and building the base for Action 4 Ashton! Attempting to keep it simple this time I will just have one other website for everything else not focused on that. I am using the domain which is my name, DeannaWayne.com registered ten years ago while I was pregnant with Ashton. To further simplify my attempts I have decided to utilize the WordPress framework and create an account with a shared hosting service thus eliminating my need for a web server, IP (Internet Protocol) address and all the necessary software. [this paragraph added 2018.04.07]
I created my first website, Deanna’s Tapestry in 2001. A few years prior a co-worker, Nancy Helbach, shared her genealogy projects with me. She got me interested in making a permanent record for Courtney who was then only preschool age. My mom had started researching her genealogy and was recording it in Family Tree Maker. I wanted to focus on my dad’s side of the family as Grandpa Miller was the only living grandparent I had for most of my life so he was the only one my children would know.
I remember Grandma Miller being sickly. I have memories of waiting rooms when Dad took Grandpa with us to go visit her, my younger sister and I of course were not allowed to go in and see her. Grandma Miller passed away when I was 8. I remember very clearly the morning my dad told me that Grandma was not suffering anymore. My first reaction was happy thinking that she was all better but dad said no, she passed away. That was very perplexing to me, happy she was no longer sick but sad that she was all gone. No one really talked much about it. I also was very perplexed that when the family was together after her funeral the focus was on my newly engaged cousin’s wedding. I did notice the tear in Grandpa’s eyes for years afterwards. My sister and I were the only young grandchildren nearby. Brian was between us in age but lived in Colorado. So Terrah and I spent a lot of quality time with Grandpa to help him not be so lonely and I have many fond memories of our time together.
I am so grateful for that but I have always longed to know more about my Grandma Miller and have memories of spending time with her. I would so love to talk to her about her life. I am just in awe imagining how she managed as a farmer’s wife and mother of six children, the first three born during 28 months, during the Depression and without any modern conveniences like a grocery store, electric washer or any type of clothes dryer. Sure, I cook most things from scratch and I regularly bake homemade bread but I would so love to spend a day with her in the kitchen and find out her favorite dishes or meals to prepare or eat, recipes passed down from her mom or grandma and any tips she had.
Besides recording a family tree, family history and old photos I also wanted a website for sharing information with family and friends. I tried out myfamily.com, homestead.com and yahoo but found them all too limited for what I wanted to do. Then I noticed we had Front Page. When I showed interest in learning how to use it Ken gave it to my mom to use and handed me an 831 page HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) book instead. LOL! He said that was all I needed. I was a bit overwhelmed with it at first to say the least but he insisted I just needed to get started. Well, he was right. I was surprised how easy it was to create what I wanted. I was free and the sky was the limit as to what I could create, well kind of.
I decided on DeannasTapestry.com for my domain name and Ken registered it for me. I wrote a theme poem, Family Tapestry, pictured to the left and started building my web presence. Ken helped me learn some JavaScript, SQL (Structured Query Language) and ASP (Active Server Pages) that I needed on some of my pages. I rushed to complete my website before the arrival of our second child. I even made a boy and a girl page so I’d be ready to announce the new addition in our family to the world. It’s a girl! After Sydney was a few months old I found it hard to keep the website updated. It became large and unorganized. Grandpa Miller died that fall and I was just so upset I couldn’t even think about my website and took a hiatus from my family history research.
A year later I really wanted to make a website for each of the girls. Ken gave me several reasons why I should no longer use framesets. So I made Sydney’s website, SydneysSpot.com without framesets when she was 18 months old. It was really cute, girly, fun and incorporated some favorite Disney movie song midi files as background music. After that I wanted to rebuild my website. Then Ken said I should learn to use ASP.NET. I started a few pages but found learning .NET to be a bit more complicated than learning HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I decided to use Courtney’s website, CourtneysCorner.com, which was a smaller project to learn .NET which I finished that spring. Then I was back to rebuilding my website with ASP.NET which I realized was always going to be a work in progress as I found more old family photos to add and heard more old stories. I also finally started creating some graphics including a logo with my tag line. I enjoy and dabble with graphics but I am by no means close to being a graphic designer.
I did learn enough ASP.NET to work from home developing websites and web applications. I was very busy getting a large application built and tested before the arrival of our third child. And of course this meant another personal website too. We are the old fashioned type that don’t peek so BabyWayne.com with a gender neutral theme it was. We were also very busy buying our first house and moving in four weeks before baby arrived. It’s a boy!
I still miss my grandparents very much. I always tell my children how fortunate they are to be able to spend time with all four of their grandparents. Emma and Ashton are still a bit too young to appreciate that yet though. I am disappointed that I did not get to have all the conversations with Grandpa Miller that I wanted to have. I still clearly see him sitting in his recliner reflectively watching Courtney, Spencer and Sarah play when the family was together visiting at his house. He sure did perk up and get a gleam in his eye when I asked him to go through his box of old photos with me. He headed straight downstairs to the closet where he kept them only to wonder when they went. Time has helped me to appreciate and treasure all the memories of the times we spent together.