I've been doing a lot of work on cemetery listings lately. I finally got the Pleasant Hill listing into a state that I can compare the cemetery association's listing with what I collected from the obituaries from Sue Horgen and to what is on findagrave.com. I also obtained the full Six Mile Grove cemetery roster and am working on getting the official Woodbury one now. Both Six Mile Grove and Woodbury had all records destroyed at some point in time so I know there will be some we will never figure out. My end goal is to reconcile all the cemetery listings, find an obituary and death certificate for every person and match to the yet-to-be created list of all Lyle people.

My oral history grant got declined because the topic was too broad but we were encouraged to re-apply. I re-wrote the grant application to split it into 3 phases:

1. Organizations and Churches
2. Businesses and Schools
3. Rural Lyle

I reapplied for a grant called "Lyle Oral History Phase 1: Organizations and Churches". We should hear results by the end of May.

The Lyle/Pacelli girls basketball team went to the state tournament this year and took 4th place. This was the first Lyle basketball team to make the state tournament since the 1962 boys team, and the first to ever win any state tournament games. I attended the section 1A final in Rochester and all three state tournament games in Minneapolis. Met Gerry Stanton, class of 1941, at the first game at Mariucci Arena.

I gathered lots of information about getting old copies of the Lyle Tribune microfilmed. The Mower County Historical Society has actual newspaper copies from 1895 to 1951. I got some quotes on getting them microfilmed and as part of that looked into other newspapers at MCHS that have not yet been microfilmed. After talking it over with John Haymond at MCHS and the Minnesota Historical Society, we think we'll try to apply for a larger grant to microfilm all of them. The grant deadline is July 31, 2015 and it will have to be a mid-sized grant which will require additional documentation. Many of the newspapers are already brittle and we risk losing them if we don't do something soon.

I worked with John Haymond at the Mower County Historical Society to apply for a Minnesota Legacy Grant. The project I proposed was to perform a series of oral history interviews about Lyle from the 1930s to present focusing on what is no longer there and what has changed. There is not much written history from those time periods and the number of people with memories from the earliest periods is dwindling. It takes 60 days to get an answer and if it is not approved we can re-apply for the next round in April.

I attended the Minnesota Genealogical Society's Northstar conference on 10/3 and 10/4 in Edina. It seems that the genealogists are more obsessive than the local historians at the AASLH conference. Judy Russell (http://legalgenealogist.com/) was the main speaker and was quite informative and interesting. I think that digging into some of the families of Lyle will help explain the history of the area.

As of September 9, 2014 lylealumni.com:

• holds 16,277 newspaper articles from 3 newspapers, all filtered manually for Lyle-area content
• holds 72 scanned Lyloneon yearbooks, from 1940 to 2011
• holds 6,102 individual scanned yearbook pages
• has 344 facebook fans of the lylealumni.com page

I built a book scanner using plans from diybookscanner.org. The idea is to use it to scan in other Lyle books such as history books, new Lyloneons, old plat books, old phone books, etc.

I removed the forums and some of the profile information from lylealumni.com. At this time I thought that facebook.com would be a better place for the social networking aspects of lylealumni.com. Most of the profile, forum and pictures were old and out of date anyway. The new vision is that lylealumni.com would serve as a digital archive with a companion facebook page for most communication aspects.

I wrote a webcrawler and started adding historical articles from the Austin Daily Herald and the Albert Lea Tribune. As of Aug 12, 2011 there were 1,800 articles on lylealumni.com.

The first few Lyloneon yearbooks were scanned and posted on lylealumi.com: 1947, 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1989, 1996 and 1999

I converted lylealumni.com to use Drupal 6.4 instead of phpAlumni. Drupal is a full-featured content management system that made it much easier to build and maintain the website.