My original intention for Chicago Hub was to create a site about Chicago neighborhoods, but I never got beyond the first post, on the subject of the West Side neighborhood where I grew up in the city, on this blog.
My goal was to write historical and current information about each of the numerous neighborhoods in Chicago and in some suburbs, but I haven’t yet taken on more than a fitful start at that task and a reading of history books about the city.
I’m still at such reading and at otherwise researching Chicago’s history, as well as its present.
But my priorities have changed.
I want to use my blog as a site for my mother’s huge extended family, the Dayers, the Swiss and the Swiss-Americans, for genealogical research about the family and about their fellow Swiss and Valaisans (from the Swiss canton Valais), in particular, and as an interactive site, where relatives and other people can leave messages, post photos, blog entries/responses, whatever.
So, I need to learn how to upgrade this blog, and I then need to spread the word so I’m not just talking to myself.
I want to do this as a productive way to spend time.
At age 48, I am no longer working or even looking for a job. I’m on disability, with neurological damage stemming from a brain tumor I had in the early 1990s, and I don’t walk, see or hear well, though I can write just fine using a keyboard.
For a dozen years, until about four years ago (October 2004), when I lost my job to downsizing by the new company (Pioneer Press) that took over, I was a journalist (reporter, then copy editor) at a now-defunct chain of weekly community papers (Lerner Newspapers) on the North and Northwest sides of Chicago and in nearby suburbs.
Now, I live at my mother’s house on the Far Northwest Side of Chicago, where I have been living since I moved out of my brother Jake’s apartment, in suburban Berwyn, where I lived for a year, starting in September 2005, as my divorce was in process….