1 The end is here

The end is here. No, not the end of the world. Planet Earth will still be spinning beyond whenever the Mayan calendar was supposed to have ended. But, as you may note in this issue's Final Word, we are discontinuing the Cleverly Newsletter, after 39-plus years, to go serve a mission. This is our final issue. Maybe.

While we are serving as missionaries, we will be unable to continue bringing you reports on what is happening in the family that has grown from Ivard and Dorothy's original nine children to probably a couple hundred people spread now across multiple generations. Or bringing you excerpts from Dorothy's diaries of 50 years earlier. Or sharing pieces of family history.

Some elements of the newsletter will actually still be available to you in different formats: Dorothy's diaries, for example, have already been available at the blog site Dorothy's Idaho Diaries (click on the link or go to http://dorothy-idaho.blogspot.com/). The posts there are the complete entries she wrote half a century ago, not just the excerpts I've shared in the monthly newsletter. I hope to prevail upon one of my children to continue that daily labor of love.

I have compiled a collection of my little Final Word essays from the nearly four decades I have been publishing the Cleverly Newsletter in a book, A Final Word: Messages to My Family. It is available at Lulu.com in paperback for $16.00 (order through me, and I can get it for you for $11.00). It is also available on Amazon.com for the same $16.00. You can search for it by title or its ISBN (978-1-105-88652-2).

Similarly, the collection of family histories I completed some years ago and distributed fairly widely, Batt & Lee Ancestors, is also available at Lulu.com as an eBook for $1.99. 

I do not see clearly what the future may hold. Perhaps after our two-year mission to Winter Quarters we may revive the Cleverly Newsletter in some form, although Claudia and I are hoping that this is just the first of multiple missions we might serve. 

I currently plan to send our immediate family a weekly e-mail reporting on our mission. At this point, I plan to send it as an e-mail, not publish it as a blog. If you care to be added to that mailing list, send me an e-mail saying so and giving me your current e-mail address. My e-mail address is dcleverly@gmail.com.

It's been fun.